POST-  IMPRESSIONS 


POST  -IMPRESSIONS 

An  Irresponsible  Chronicle 

BY  ' 
SIMEON  STRUNSKY 

Author  of  "The  Patient  Observer,"  "Through 
the  Outlooking  Glass,"  etc. 


1  -J  O 
S  a  1  '7 


NEW  YORK 

DODD,  MEAD  AND  COMPANY 
1914 


COPYRIGHT,    1913, 

BY   THE    EVENING    POST   COMPANY, 

COPYRIGHT,  1914, 
BY  DODD,  MEAD  AND  COMPANY 

Published,  March,  1914 


The  papers  in  the  present  volume  were  published 
during  1913  in  the  Saturday  Magazine  of  the  New 
York  Evening  Post. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

I  ALMA  MATER  BROADWAY  . 

II  THE   CONTEMPLATIVE   LIFE    . 

III  SUMMER  READING  . 

IV  NOCTURNE 

V  HAROLD'S  SOUL,  I  . 

VI  EDUCATIONAL 

VII  MORGAN 

VIII  THE    MODERN    INQUISITION ._ 

IX  THORNS  IN  THE   CUSHION 

X  LOW-GRADE  CITIZENS   . 

XI  ROMANCE     •__.-_• 

XII  WANDERLUST 

XIII  UNREVISED   SCHEDULES 

XIV  SOMEWHAT    CONFUSED 

XV  HAROLD'S  SOUL,  II      ... 

XVI  RHETORIC    21 

XVII  REAL  PEOPLE 

XVIII  DIFFERENT 

XIX  ACADEMIC    FREEDOM     . 

XX  THE   HEAVENLY   MAID 

XXI  SHEATH-GOWNS        .... 

XXII  WITH  THE   EDITOR'S  REGRETS 

XXIII  A    MAD    WORLD 


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580173 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

XXIV     PH.D 202 

XXV  Two  AND  Two     ......   211 

XXVI  BRICK  AND  MORTAR       .      .      .   220 

XXVII     INCOHERENT 228 

XXVIII     REALISM 236 

XXIX     ART     .      . 239 

XXX  THE  PACE  OF  LIFE  ....   242 

XXXI  MARCUS  AURELIUS,   1914      .      .   244 

XXXII  BY  THE  TURN  OF  A  HAND  .      .   247 

XXXIII  THE  QUARRY  SLAVE       .,     .      .   250 

XXXIV  MONOTONY  OF  THE  POLES  .      .   253 


POST-  IMPRESSIONS 


ALMA  MATER  BROADWAY 

HE  came  in  without  having  himself  an- 
nounced, nodded  cheerfully,  and  dropped  into 
a  chair  across  the  desk  from  where  I  sat. 

"  I  am  not  interfering  with  your  work,  am 
I?"  he  said. 

"  To  tell  the  truth,"  I  replied,  «  this  is  the 
busiest  day  in  the  week  for  me." 

"  Fine,"  he  said.  "  That  means  your  mind 
is  working  at  its  best,  brain  cells  exploding 
in  great  shape,  and  you  can  follow  my  argu- 
ment without  the  slightest  difficulty.  What 
I  have  to  say  is  of  the  highest  importance. 
It  concerns  the  present  condition  of  the 
stage." 

"  In  that  case,"  I  said,  "  you  want  to  see 
Mr.  Smith.  He  is  the  editor  responsible  for 
our  dramatic  page." 

"  I  want  to  speak  to  the  irresponsible  ed- 
itor," he  said.  "  I  asked  and  they  showed 


IMP  SESSIONS 

m£  ipL-t  lief  el  •  I;  tfcink '  I  had  better  begin  at 
the  beginning." 

I  sighed  and  looked  out  of  the  window. 
But  that  made  no  difference.  He,  too,  looked 
out  of  the  window  and  spoke  as  follows: 

"  Last  night,"  he  said,  "  I  attended  the 
first  performance  of  A.  B.  Johnson's  power- 
ful four-act  drama  entitled  *  H2O.'  It  was 
a  remorseless  exposure  of  the  phenomena  at- 
tending the  condensation  of  steam.  In  the 
old  days  before  the  theatre  became  perfectly 
free  the  general  public  knew  nothing  of  the 
consequences  that  ensue  when  you  bring 
water  to  a  temperature  of  £12  degrees  Fah- 
renheit. The  public  didn't  know  and  didn't 
care.  Those  who  did  know  kept  the  secret 
to  themselves.  I  am  not  exaggerating  when 
I  say  that  there  was  a  conspiracy  of  silence 
on  the  subject.  A  play  like  *  H2O  '  would 
have  been  impossible.  The  public  would  not 
have  tolerated  such  thoroughgoing  realism  as 
Johnson  employs  in  his  first  act,  for  in- 
stance. With  absolute  fidelity  to  things  as 
they  are  he  puts  before  us  a  miniature  recip- 


ALMA  MATER  BROADWAY         3 

locating  engine,  several  turbine  engines,  and 
the  latest  British  and  German  models  in  boil- 
ers, piston-rods,  and  valve-gears.  When  the 
curtain  rose  on  the  most  masterly  presenta- 
tion of  a  machine  shop  ever  brought  before 
the  public,  the  house  rocked  with  applause. 
But  this  was  nothing  compared  to  the  deliri- 
ous outburst  that  marked  the  climax  of  the 
second  act,  when  the  hero,  with  his  arm  about 
the  woman  he  loves,  proudly  declares  that 
saturated  steam  under  a  pressure  of  200 
pounds  shows  843.8  units  of  latent  heat  and 
a  volume  of  2.294  cubic  feet  to  the  pound. 
The  curtain  was  raised  eleven  times,  but  the 
audience  would  not  be  content  until  the  au- 
thor appeared  before  the  footlights  escorted 
by  a  master  plumber  and  the  president  of 
the  steamfitters'  union. 

"  The  third  act  was  laid  in  the  reception 
room  of  a  Tenderloin  resort  — " 

"  I  don't  quite  see,"  I  said. 

"  That  followed  inevitably  from  the  devel- 
opment of  the  plot,"  he  replied.  "  The  hero- 
ine, you  must  understand,  had  been  abducted 


4  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

by  the  president  of  a  rival  steamfitters'  union 
and  had  been  sold  into  a  life  of  shame.  She 
is  saved  in  the  nick  of  time  by  an  explosion 
of  the  boiler  due  to  superheated  steam.  In 
the  old  days  such  a  scene  would  have  been 
impossible  and  the  author's  lesson  about 
the  effects  of  condensation  and  vaporization 
would  have  been  lost  to  the  world." 

"  And  the  play  will  be  a  success?  "  I  said. 

"  It's  a  knockout,"  he  replied.  "  No  play 
of  real  life  with  a  punch  like  that  has  been 
produced  since  C.  D.  Brewster  put  on  his 
three-act  tragi-comedy,  ( Ad  Valorem.'  As 
the  title  implies,  the  play  sets  out  to  demon- 
strate the  difference  between  the  Payne- 
Aldrich  tariff  law  and  the  Underwood  law, 
item  by  item.  I  have  rarely  seen  an  audience 
so  deeply  stirred  as  all  of  us  were  during  the 
long  and  pathetic  scene  toward  the  end  of 
the  first  act  in  which  the  author  deals  with 
the  chemical  and  mineral  oil  schedule.  Are 
you  aware  that  under  the  Underwood  law 
the  duty  on  formaldehyde  is  reduced  from 
twenty-five  per  cent,  to  one  cent  a  pound?  " 


ALMA  MATER   BROADWAY         S 

"  I  hardly  ever  go  to  the  theatre  nowa- 
days," I  said. 

He  looked  at  me  reproachfully. 

"  Some  day  you  will  find  yourself,  quite 
unexpectedly,  facing  a  crisis  in  which  your 
ignorance  of  the  duty  on  formaldehyde  will 
cost  you  dear,  and  then  you  will  have  cause 
to  regret  your  indifference  toward  the  prog- 
ress of  the  modern  drama.  However,  the 
third  act  of  *  Ad  Valorem '  is  laid  in  the  re- 
ception room  of  a  Tenderloin  resort." 

"What?"  I  said. 

"  It  was  bound  to  be,"  he  replied.  "  Freed 
from  all  Puritanical  restrictions,'  the  play- 
wright of  the  present  day  follows  wherever 
his  plot  leads  him  in  accordance  with  the 
truth  of  life.  In  '  Ad  Valorem,'  for  instance, 
the  fabulously  rich  importer  of  oils  and 
chemicals  who  is  the  villain  of  the  piece  has 
succeeded  in  smuggling  an  enormously  valu- 
able consignment  of  formaldehyde  out  of  the 
Government  warehouse.  What  is  more  nat- 
ural than  that  he  should  conceal  the  smuggled 
goods  in  the  Tenderloin?  The  case  is  a  per- 


6  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

fectly  simple  one.  Forbid  a  playwright  to 
show  the  interior  of  a  Tenderloin  dive  and 
the  public  will  never  know  the  truth  about  the 
Underwood  bill.  You  see,  there  is  nothing 
about  the  tariff  in  the  newspapers.  There  is 
nothing  in  the  magazines.  College  profes- 
sors never  mention  the  subject.  Campaign 
speakers  ignore  it.  There  is  a  conspiracy 
of  silence.  Only  the  theatre  offers  us  en- 
lightenment on  the  subject.  Under  such  con- 
ditions would  you  keep  the  playwright  from 
telling  us  what  he  knows  ?  " 

"  Putting  it  that  way  — "  I  said. 

"  I  knew  you  would  agree  with  me,"  he 
went  on.  "  Take,  for  instance,  E.  F.  Bir- 
mingham's realistic  drama,  '  The  Shortest 
Way,'  in  which  the  author  has  demonstrated 
with  implacable  truthfulness  and  irresistible 
logic  that  in  any  triangle  the  sum  of  two 
sides  is  greater  than  the  third.  In  a  joint 
letter  to  the  freshman  classes  of  Columbia 
University  and  New  York  University,  the 
author  and  the  producer  of  '  The  Shortest 
Way '  have  pointed  out  that  nowhere  have 


ALMA  MATER  BROADWAY         7 

the  principles  of  plane  geometry  been  so 
clearly  formulated  as  in  the  second  act  of  the 
play.  The  gunman  has  just  shot  down  his 
victim  on  the  corner  of  Broadway  and 
Forty-second  Street.  He  flees  northward  on 
Broadway  to  Forty-third  Street  and  then 
doubles  backward  on  Seventh  Avenue.  The 
hero,  who  is  a  professor  of  mathematics,  re- 
calling his  Euclid,  runs  westward  on  Forty- 
second  Street,  and  the  curtain  descends.  At 
the  beginning  of  the  next  act  we  find  that  the 
gunman  has  taken  refuge  in  the  reception 
room  of  a  Tender  — " 

"  I  know,"  I  replied.  "  He  was  driven 
there  by  the  irresistible  logic  of  the  drama- 
tist's idea." 

"  Exactly,"  he  said.     And  so  left  me. 


II 

THE  CONTEMPLATIVE  LIFE 

FEOM  the  chapter  entitled  "  My  Milkman," 
in  Cooper's  volume  of  "  Contemporary  Por- 
traits," hitherto  unpublished,  through  no 
fault  of  his  own,  but  because  one  publisher 
declined  to  handle  anything  but  typewritten 
copy,  and  another  suggested  that  if  cut  down 
by  half  the  book  might  be  accepted  by  the 
editor  of  some  religious  publication,  and  still 
another  editor  thought  that  if  several  chap- 
ters were  expanded  and  a  love  story  inserted, 
the  thing  might  do,  otherwise  there  was  no 
market  for  essays,  especially  such  as  failed 
to  take  a  cheerful  view  of  life,  whereupon 
Cooper  insisted  that  his  book  was  exception- 
ally cheerful,  inasmuch  as  it  showed  that  life 
could  be  tolerable  in  spite  of  being  so  queer, 
to  which  the  editor  replied  that  serializing 
a  book  of  humour  was  quite  out  of  the  ques- 
tion. "  Then  how  about  Pickwick? "  said 
8 


THE   CONTEMPLATIVE  LIFE      9 

Cooper  —  but  let  us  get  back  to  the  chapter 
on  the  milkman.     I  quote : 

Would  sleep  never  come!  I  shifted  the 
pillow  to  the  foot  of  the  bed  and  back ;  threw 
off  the  covers  ;  pulled  them  over  my  head ;  dis- 
carded them;  repeated  the  multiplication 
table ;  counted  footsteps  in  the  street  beneath 
my  window;  lit  a  cigarette;  tried  to  go  to 
sleep  sitting  up  and  embracing  my  knees  the 
way  they  bury  the  dead  in  Yucatan.  No  use. 
I  would  doze  off,  and  immediately  that  unfor- 
tunate column  of  figures  would  appear,  de- 
manding to  be  added  up,  and  I  unable  to 
determine  whether  sums  written  in  Roman 
numerals  could  be  added  up  at  all.  That  is 
the  disadvantage  of  taking  conversation  seri- 
ously, after  ten  in  the  evening,  or  at  any 
time.  I  had  been  discussing  the  immigration 
problem  till  nearly  midnight,  and  now  I  was 
busy  adding  up  the  annual  influx  from  Aus- 
tria-Hungary during  the  last  twelve  years 
expressed  in  Roman  numerals.  Some  people 
are  »differentk  Their  opinions  don't  hurt 
them.  I  have  heard  people  say  the  most  bit- 


10  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ing  things  about  the  need  of  abolishing  reli- 
gion and  the  family,  and  five  minutes  later 
ask  for  a  caviare  sandwich.  Whereas  I  take 
the  total  immigration  from  Austria-Hungary 
for  the  last  twelve  years  to  bed  with  me  and 
cannot  fall  asleep. 

I  heard  the  rattle  of  wheels  under  my  win- 
dow. It  was  nearing  daybreak.  I  looked  at 
my  watch  and  it  was  close  to  five.  I  got  up, 
washed  in  cold  water,  dressed,  and  went  out- 
side. As  I  walked  downstairs  I  heard  the 
clatter  of  bottles  in  the  hallway  below  and 
some  one  whistling  cheerfully.  It  was  the 
milkman.  His  wagon  was  at  the  curb,  and  as 
I  passed  down  the  front  steps  and  stopped  to 
breathe  in  the  sharp,  clean,  mystic  air  of 
dawn,  the  milkman's  horse  raised  his  head, 
gazed  at  me  for  a  moment  with  a  curious, 
friendly  scepticism,  and  sank  back  into 
thoughtful  contemplation  of  a  spot  eighteen 
inches  immediately  in  front  of  his  fore-legs. 

(Here  one  editor  had  written  in  the  mar- 
gin :  "  Amateurish  beginning ;  should  have 
led  off  with  a  crisp  phrase  or  two  addressed 


THE   CONTEMPLATIVE  LIFE       11 

to  the  milkman  and  then  proceeded  to  a  psy- 
chological analysis  of  the  milkman's  horse.") 

I  said  to  the  milkman : 

"  This  life  of  yours  must  be  wonderfully 
conducive  to  seeing  things  from  a  new  angle. 
A  world  of  chill  and  pure  half-shadows ;  the 
happiest  time  of  the  twenty-four  hours ;  the 
roisterers  gone  to  bed  and  the  factory-work- 
ers not  stirring  for  a  good  hour.  I  should 
imagine  that  men  in  your  line  would  all  be 
philosophers." 

"  It  does  get  a  bit  lonely,"  he  said.  "  But 
I  always  carry  an  evening  paper  with  me  and 
read  a  few  lines  from  house  to  house.  Do 
you  think  they'll  let  Thaw  off?  " 

"  What  do  you  think  about  it  ?  "  I  said. 
"  I  haven't  been  following  up  the  case." 

"  I  have  read  every  bit  of  the  story,"  he 
said.  "  He  isn't  any  more  crazy  than  you  or 
me.  He's  been  punished  enough;  what's  the 
use  of  persecuting  a  man  like  that  ?  " 

If  Thaw  were  as  sound  in  mind  as  my  friend 
the  milkman,  there  would  be  no  doubt  that 
he  deserved  his  freedom.  My  new  acquaint- 


12  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ance  was  so  well  set  up,  so  clear-eyed,  with 
that  ruddy  glow  which  comes  from  shaving 
and  washing  in  cold  water  before  dawn,  with 
the  quiet  air  of  peace  and  strength  which 
comes  from  working  in  the  silent  hours.  I 
thought  what  an  upright,  independent  life  a 
milkman's  must  be,  so  free  from  the  petty 
chaffering  and  meanness  that  make  up  the 
ordinary  tradesman's  routine.  He  has  no 
competition  to  contend  with.  He  is  no  one's 
servant.  He  deposits  his  wares  at  your  door- 
step and  you  take  them  or  leave  them  as  you 
please.  He  can  work  in  the  dark  because  he 
does  not  need  the  light  to  study  your  face 
and  overreach  you.  With  no  one  to  watch 
him,  with  no  one  to  criticise  him,  with  leisure 
and  silence  in  which  to  work  out  his  problems 
—  I  envied  him. 

(Here  another  editor  had  written: 
"  Tedious ;  chance  for  an  excellent  bit  of  char- 
acterisation in  dialogue  entirely  missed.") 

"  You're  an  early  riser,"  he  said. 

"  Can't  fall  asleep,"  I  said.  "  This  air  will 
do  me  good." 


THE   CONTEMPLATIVE   LIFE       13 

"  A  brisk  walk,"  he  suggested. 

"  I'm  too  tired,"  I  said. 

He  turned  on  the  wagon  step.  "  Jump 
in,"  he  said ;  and  when  I  was  seated  beside  him 
he  clucked  to  the  horse,  who  raised  his  droop- 
ing head  and  started  off  diagonally  across  the 
street,  apparently  confident  that  he  would  find 
another  cobblestone  to  contemplate,  eighteen 
inches  in  front  of  his  fore-legs. 

"  A  good  many  more  people  find  it  hard  to 
sleep  nowadays  than  ever  before,"  he  said. 
"  You  can  tell  by  the  windows  that  are  lit  up. 
Though  very  often  it's  diphtheria  or  some- 
thing of  the  sort.  You  hear  the  little  things 
whimper,  and  sometimes  a  man  will  run  down 
the  street  and  pull  the  night-bell  at  the  drug- 
store." 

"  Then  you  don't  read  all  the  time  while 
you  are  driving?  " 

"  Oh,  you  notice  those  things  and  keep  on 
reading.  It  isn't  very  noisy  about  this  time 
of  the  day."  He  laughed. 

"  I  should  think  you'd  be  tired,"  I  said. 

He  said  they  did  not  work  them  too  hard 


14  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

in  his  line.  The  hours  were  reasonable.  At 
one  time  there  was  an  attempt  on  the  part  of 
the  dairy  companies  to  make  the  hours 
longer;  but  the  milkmen  have  some  union  of 
their  own,  and  there  was  a  strike  which  ended 
in  the  companies  agreeing  to  pay  for  over- 
time from  7  to  9  A.  M.  Their  association 
was  more  of  a  social  and  benefit  society  than 
a  trade  union.  Once  a  month  in  summer 
they  had  an  outing  with  lunch  and  some  kind 
of  a  cabaret  show  and  dancing.  They  were 
a  contented  lot.  The  work  was  not  too  ex- 
acting. He  could  read  the  evening  paper 
when  it  got  light  enough,  or  sometimes  he 
could  just  sit  still  and  think. 

Think  what? 

Again  I  envied  him.  What  extraordinary 
facilities  this  man  had  for  thinking  straight, 
for  seeing  things  clearly  in  this  crisp  morn- 
ing air,  and  around  him  silence  and  every- 
thing as  fresh,  as  frank,  as  fragrant  as  when 
the  world  was  still  young. 

He  blushed  and  hesitated,  but  finally  con- 
fessed that  for  more  than  a  year  he  had  been 


THE   CONTEMPLATIVE  LIFE       15 

carrying  about  in  his  head  a  scenario  for  a 
moving-picture  play.  His  story  was  natu- 
rally interrupted  at  frequent  intervals  as  he 
went  about  the  distribution  of  his  milk  bot- 
tles. But  stripped  of  repetitions  and  am- 
biguities the  plot  he  had  evolved  in  the  course 
of  more  than  a  year's  driving  through  the 
silent  streets  was  about  as  follows: 

The  infant  daughter  of  an  extremely 
wealthy  Mexican  mine-owner  is  stolen  by  the 
gipsies.  When  she  grows  up  she  is  chosen 
by  the  gipsy  king  for  his  bride.  Before  the 
wedding  takes  place  the  gipsies  plan  to  rob 
the  house  of  a  Mexican  millionaire  who  is  no 
other  than  the  girl's  father.  She  volunteers 
to  gain  entrance  into  the  house  by  posing  as 
a  celebrated  Spanish  dancer.  At  night  she 
opens  the  door  to  her  confederates.  Leav- 
ing the  girl  to  keep  watch  over  their  pris- 
oner, the  gipsies  go  about  ransacking  the 
house.  The  unhappy  man  groans  and  cries 
out,  "  Ah,  if  only  I  could  see  my  little  Juan- 
ita  before  I  die."  Father  and  daughter  rec- 
ognise each  other,  she  releases  him  from  his 


16  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

bonds,  and  arming  themselves  with  Brown- 
ing revolvers  they  shoot  down  the  gipsy 
marauders  as  they  enter  the  room  in  single 
file.  Juanita  marries  the  young  overseer 
whom  the  childless  old  man  has  designated 
as  his  heir. 

(Here  one  editor  wrote:  "An  ordinary 
plot ;  nothing  in  it  to  show  that  it  was  written 
by  a  milkman  instead  of  a  clergyman  or  a 
structural  iron  worker.") 

I  think  the  criticism  is  a  fair  one. 


OUR  vacation  plans  last  year  were  of  the 
simplest.  Personally,  I  said  to  Emmeline, 
there  was  just  one  thing  I  longed  for  —  to  get 
away  to  some  quiet  place  where  I  could  lie  on 
my  back  under  the  trees  and  look  up  at  the 
clouds.  To  this  Emmeline  replied  that  in  this 
posture  (1)  I  always  smoke  too  much;  (2)  I 
catch  cold  and  begin  to  sneeze;  (3)  I  don't 
look  at  the  clouds  at  all,  but  tire  my  eyes  by 
studying  the  baseball  page  in  the  full  glare 
of  the  sunj  The  newspaper  habit  is  one 
which  I  regularly  forswear  every  summer  on 
leaving  town.  I  hold  to  my  resolution  to  this 
extent  that  I  refrain  from  going  down  to  the 
post  office  in  the  morning  to  buy  a  paper. 
But  toward  eleven  o'clock  the  strain  be- 
comes unendurable  and  I  borrow  a  copy  of 
yesterday's  paper  after  peering  wistfully 

over    other    people's    shoulders.     Emmeline 
17 


18  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

thinks  this  habit  all  the  more  inexcusable  be- 
cause, working  for  a  newspaper  myself,  I 
ought  to  know  there  is  never  anything  in 
them.  She  can't  imagine  what  drives  me 
on.  I  told  her,  perhaps  it  is  the  uncon- 
scious hope  that  some  day  I  shall  find  in 
the  paper  something  worth  whilel 

Actually,  one  soon  discovers  that  the  simple 
act  of  lying  on  one's  back  on  the  grass  and 
looking  up  at  the  clouds  involves  an  extraor- 
dinary amount  of  preparation.  I  am  in- 
clined to  think  that  there  must  be  correspond- 
ence courses  which  teach  in  ten  lessons  how 
to  lie  on  one's  back  properly  and  look  up. 
There  must  be  text-books  on  how  to  tell  the 
cumuli  from  the  cirrus.  There  must  be  use- 
ful hints  on  how  to  relax  and  lose  yourself 
in  the  immensity  of  the  blue  void.  | 

The  personal  equipment  one  needs  to  gaze 
at  the  clouds,  if  you  believe  the  department 
stores,  is  tremendous.  English  flannels; 
French  shirtings ;  native  khaki ;  silks  ;  home- 
spuns ;  belts  with  a  monogram  buckle ; 
flowered  cravats  in  Colours  to  blend  with  the 


SUMMER   READING  19 

foliage ;  safety  razors ;  extra  blades  for  the 
razors ;  strops  to  sharpen  the  blades ;  un- 
guents to  keep  the  strops  flexible;  nickeled 
cases  to  keep  the  unguents  in;  and  metal 
polish  for  the  nickeled  cases.  Arduous 
labour  is  involved  in  going  to  Maple  View 
Farm  from  the  comparatively  simple  civi- 
lisation of  New  York.  I  am  not  certain 
whether  in  the  best  circles  one  can  properly 
lie  on  one's  back  and  look  at  the  clouds  with- 
out a  humidor  and  a  thermos  bottle. 

Emmeline  said  I  must  be  sure  and  not  for- 
get my  fishing-pole,  as  that  trout  in  the  brook 
behind  the  barn  would  probably  be  expect- 
ing me. 

It  seems  absurd  for  a  full-grown  man  to 
speak  of  hating  a  trout.  But  why  deny  it? 
When  I  think  of  the  utterly  debased  crea- 
ture in  the  pool  behind  the  barn,  the  ac- 
cumulated results  of  ten  thousand  years  of 
civilisation  drop  from  me,  and  my  heart  is 
surcharged  with  venom.  It  all  came  about 
so  gradually.  My  landlord  asked  me  one 
morning  whether  J  shouldn't  like  tc  try  my 


20  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

luck  with  his  rod.  I  said  I  should.  I  took 
his  rod  and  hooked  the  blackberry  bush  on 
the  other  side  of  the  stream.  I  did  better 
on  my  next  try.  As  my  hook  sank  below 
the  surface,  a  thrill  ran  along  the  line,  the 
slender  bamboo  stem  arched  forward,  and 
I  waited  with  my  heart  in  my  mouth  for  an 
enormous  trout  to  emerge  and  engage  me 
in  a  life-and-death  struggle.  But  through 
three  long  weeks  he  refused  to  emerge.  Em- 
meline  said  it  was  the  bottom  of  the  soap-box 
whose  upper  edge  is  visible  above  the  surface. 
But  that  cannot  be.  No  inanimate  object 
could  elicit  in  any  one  the  rage  and  the  sense 
of  frustrated  desire  —  perhaps  I  had  better 
say  no  more.  All  my  better  instincts  cor- 
rode with  the  thought  of  that  fish.  It  would 
have  been  compensation,  at  least,  if  I  had 
ever  caught  any  other  fish  in  that  brook.  It 
might  have  been  a  near  relation,  a  favourite 
son  perhaps,  and  I  should  have  had  my  re- 
venge —  but  there  I  go  again. 

What  Emmeline  wanted  was  a  chance  to 


SUMMER   READING  21 


catch  up  in  her  reading?"  It  had  been  a  hard 
winter  and  spring,  with  the  doctor  too  fre- 
quently in  the  house  and  books  quite  out  of 
the  question^  There  were  a  half-dozen 
novels  Emmeline  had  in  mind,  not  to  mention 
Mr.  Bryce's  book  on  South  America,  John 
Masefield,  and  Strindberg,  whom  she  cor- 
dially detests.  I  do  too.  I  warned  her 
against  drawing  up  too  ambitious  a  list,  but 
she  was  determined  to  make  a  summer  of  it. 
She  said  she  felt  illiterate  and  terribly  old. 
All  I  could  do  was  to  mention  a  few  book- 
shops where  she  could  get  the  best  choice 
with  the  least  expenditure  of  energy. 
Nevertheless  she  came  back  from  her  first 
day's  shopping  with  a  headache. 

Eponge  is  a  rough,  Turkish-towel  fabric, 
selling  in  many  widths,  and  eminently  de- 
sirable for  out-of-door  wear  because  of  its 
peculiar  adaptability  to  the  slim  styles  which 
prevent  walking.  Eponge  has  this  fatal  de- 
fect, however,  that  when  it  is  advertised  in 
ready-made  gowns  at  an  astounding  reduc- 
tion from  $39.50,  all  the  desirable  models 


22  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

sell  out  some  time  before  ten  o'clock  in  the 
morning.  Hence  Emmeline's  headache.  She 
took  very  little  supper  and  expressed  the  be- 
lief that  our  vacation  would  be  a  complete 
failure.  The  mountains  are  always  hot  and 
dusty  and  the  crowd  is  a  very  mixed  one. 
|  After  a  while  Emmeline  had  a  cup  of  tea 
and  felt  better.  We  went  over  our  list  of 
books  for  the  summer  and  she  wondered 
whether  it  wouldn't  pay  to  get  a  seamstress 
into  the  house  and  avoid  the  exhausting  trips 
downtown.  On  second  thoughts  she  decided 
not  to.  I  Next  morning  she  was  quite  well 
and  asked  me  to  remind  her  not  to  forget 
Robert  Herrick's  new  novel.  She  said  she 
might  drop  in  at  the  office  for  lunch  if  she 
got  through  early  at  the  stores,  and  we 
might  look  at  books  together. 

Charmeuse  is  a  shimmering,  silk-like 
material  which  lends  itself  admirably  to  sum- 
mer wear,  because  it  stains  easily.  But  in 
its  effect  on  the  shopper's  nerves,  charmeuse 
is  even  worse  than  eponge.  In  fact,  as  a 
preparation  for  a  summer's  reading,  I  don't 


SUMMER   READING  23 

know  what  is  more  exhausting  than  char- 
meuse,  unless  it  be  crepe  de  Chine.  Em- 
meline  did  not  drop  in  for  lunch  that  day, 
and  when  I  came  home  at  night,  I  found  her 
more  depressed  than  ever.  There  was  noth- 
ing to  be  had  downtown.  Prices  were  impos- 
sible and  anything  else  wasn't  fit  to  be 
touched.  It  might  be  just  as  well  to  stay 
in  town  for  the  summer  as  go  away  and  take 
the  chance  of  getting  typhoid.  The  situa- 
tion was  somewhat  relieved  by  the  arrival  at 
this  juncture  of  several  parcels,  some  long 
and  narrow,  and  others  short  and  square. 
One  particularly  heavy  box  felt  as  if  it  might 
contain  a  set  of  Strindberg,  but  turned  out  to 
be  a  really  handsome  coat  in  blue  chinchilla 
which  Emmeline  explained  would  be  just  the 
thing  for  cool  nights  in  the  country.  She 
had  bought  it  in  despair  at  obtaining  the 
kind  of  crepe  de  Chine  she  wanted.  The 
crepe  de  Chine  came  in  a  smaller  box. 

At  breakfast  the  next  day  we  were  tre- 
mendously cheerful.  I  told  Emmeline  of  the 
handsome  raincoat  I  had  bought  in  prepara- 


24  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

tion  for  lying  on  my  back  on  the  grass  and 
looking  up  at  the  clouds.  From  that  we 
passed  to  the  new  Brieux  play.  But  when 
Emmeline  intimated  that  she  was  going 
downtown  soon  after  breakfast,  I  grew  anx- 
ious. 

"Do  you  think,"  I  said,  "that  it  will 
really  make  any  difference  to  Mr.  Gals- 
worthy whether  you  read  him  in  a  voile  or  in 
a  white  cotton  ratine  ?  " 

"  If  that  is  the  way  you  feel  about  it," 
said  Emmeline,  "  I  can  telephone  and  have 
them  take  all  these  things  back.  I  hate 
them  anyhow." 

"  What  I  mean  is,"  I  said,  "  that  you  don't 
want  to  wear  yourself  out  completely  before 
we  leave  the  city.  We  have  a  month's  read- 
ing ahead  of  us.  Let  us  begin  it  in  peace 
of  mind." 

"  With  nothing  to  wear  ?  "  she  said. 

Tulle  is  a  partly  transparent  material, 
which  in  the  hands  of  a  skilful  milliner  be- 
comes an  invaluable  aid  to  a  thorough  com- 
prehension of  the  plays  of  M.  Brieux, 


SUMMER   READING  25 

especially  when  studied  amid  the  complexities 
of  life  on  Maple  View  Farm.  As  usual,  it 
is  the  department  stores  which  have  been  first 
to  discover  this  fundamental  connection  in 
life.  They  have  everything  necessary  for  the 
thorough  enjoyment  of  Mr.  Bryce's  book 
on  South  America  —  blouses,  toques,  para- 
sols, and  tennis  shoes.  Special  bargains  in 
linen  crash  and  batiste  are  offered  on  the 
same  day  with  a  cut-rate  edition  of 
"  Damaged  Goods."  Reading  Brieux  in  the 
country  is  almost  as  complicated  a  diversion 
as  lying  on  one's  back  and  looking  up  at  the 
clouds. 


IV 

NOCTURNE 

ONCE  every  three  months,  with  fair  regular- 
ity, she  was  brought  into  the  Night  Court, 
found  guilty,  and  fined.  She  came  in  between 
eleven  o'clock  and  midnight,  when  the  traffic 
of  the  court  is  as  its  heaviest,  and  it  would 
be  an  hour,  perhaps,  before  she  was  called 
to  the  bar.  When  her  turn  came  she  would 
rise  from  her  seat  at  one  end  of  the  prisoners' 
bench  and  confront  the  magistrate. 

Her  eyes  did  not  reach  to  the  level  of  the 
magistrate's  desk.  A  policeman  in  citizens' 
clothes  would  mount  the  witness  stand,  take 
oath  with  a  seriousness  of  mien  which  was 
surprising,  in  view  of  the  frequency  with 
which  he  was  called  upon  to  repeat  the  for- 
mula, and  testify  in  an  illiterate  drone  to  a 
definite  infraction  of  the  law  of  the  State, 
committed  in  his  presence  and  with  his  en- 
couragement. While  he  spoke  the  magis- 
26 


NOCTURNE  27 

trate  would  look  at  the  ceiling.  When  she 
was  called  upon  to  answer  she  defended  her- 
self with  an  obvious  lie  or  two,  while  the 
magistrate  looked  over  her  head.  He  would 
then  condemn  her  to  pay  the  sum  of  ten  dol- 
lars to  the  State  and  let  her  go. 

She  came  to  look  forward  to  her  visits  at 
the  Night  Court. 

The  Night  Court  is  no  longer  a  centre  of 
general  interest.  During  the  first  few 
months  after  it  was  established,  two  or  three 
years  ago,  it  was  one  of  the  great  sights  of  a 
great  city.  For  the  newspapers  it  was  a 
rich  source  of  human-interest  stories.  It 
replaced  Chinatown  in  its  appeal  to  visitors 
from  out  of  town.  It  stirred  even  the  lan- 
guid pulses  of  the  native  inhabitant  with 
its  offerings  of  something  new  in  the  way 
of  "  life."  The  sociologists,  sincere  and 
amateur,  crowded  the  benches  and  took  notes. 

To-day  the  novelty  is  worn  off.  The 
newspapers  long  ago  abandoned  the  Night 
Court,  clergymen  go  to  it  rarely  for  their 


28  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

texts,  and  the  tango  has  taken  its  place. 
But  the  sociologists  and  the  casual  visitor 
have  not  disappeared.  Serious  people,  anx- 
ious for  an  immediate  vision  of  the  pity  of 
life,  continue  to  fill  the  benches  comfortably. 
No  session  of  the  court  is  without  its  little 
group  of  social  investigators,  among  whom 
the  women  are  in  the  majority.  Many  of 
them  are  young  women,  exceedingly  sym- 
pathetic, handsomely  gowned.,  and  very  well 
taken  care  of. 

As  she  sat  at  one  end  of  the  prisoners' 
bench  waiting  her  turn  before  the  magis- 
trate's desk,  she  would  cast  a  sidelong  glance 
over  the  railing  that  separated  her  from  the 
handsomely  gowned,  gently  bred,  sym- 
pathetic young  women  in  the  audience.  She 
observed  with  extraordinary  admiration  and 
delight  those  charming  faces  softened  in 
pity,  the  graceful  bearing,  the  admirably  con- 
structed yet  simple  coiffures,  the  elegance  of 
dress,  which  she  compared  with  the  best  that 
the  windows  in  Sixth  Avenue  could  show.  She 
was  amazed  to  find  such  gowns  actually  be- 


NOCTURNE  29 

ing  worn  instead  of  remaining  as  an  unat- 
tainable ideal  on  smiling  lay  figures  in  the 
shop  windows. 

Occupants  of  the  prisoners'  bench  are  not 
supposed  to  stare  at  the  spectators.  She 
had  to  steal  a  glance  now  and  then.  Her 
visits  to  the  Night  Court  had  become  so 
much  a  matter  of  routine  that  she  would  ven- 
ture a  peep  over  the  railing  while  the  case 
immediately  preceding  her  own  was  being 
tried.  Once  or  twice  she  was  surprised  by 
the  clerk  who  called  her  name.  She  stood 
up  mechanically  and  faced  the  magistrate 
as  Officer  Smith,  in  civilian  clothes,  mounted 
the  witness  stand. 

She  had  no  grudge  against  Officer  Smith. 
She  did  not  visualise  him  either  as  a  person 
or  as  a  part  of  a  system.  He  was  merely 
an  incident  of  her  trade.  She  had  neither 
the  training  nor  the  imagination  to  look 
behind  Officer  Smith  and  see  a  communal 
policy  which  has  not  the  power  to  suppress, 
nor  the  courage  to  acknowledge,  nor  the  skill 
to  regulate,  and  so  contents  itself  with  send- 


30  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ing  out  full-fed  policemen  in  civilian  clothes 
to  work  up  the  evidence  that  defends  society 
against  her  kind  through  the  imposition  of  a 
ten-dollar  fine. 

To  some  of  the  women  on  the  visitors' 
benches  the  cruelty  of  the  process  came  home : 
this  business  of  setting  a  two-hundred-pound 
policeman  in  citizens'  clothes,  backed  up  by 
magistrates,  clerks,'  court  criers,  interpreters, 
and  court  attendants,  to  worrying  a  ten-dol- 
lar fine  out  of  a  half-grown  woman  under  an 
enormous  imitation  ostrich  plume.  The  pro- 
fessional sociologists  were  chiefly  interested 
in  the  money  cost  of  this  process  to  the  tax- 
payer, and  they  took  notes  on  the  propor- 
tion of  first  offenders.  Yet  the  Night  Court 
is  a  remarkable  advance  in  civilisation. 
Formerly,  in  addition  to  her  fine,  the  prisoner 
would  pay  a  commission  to  the  professional 
purveyor  of  bail. 

Sometimes,  if  the  magistrate  was  young  or 
new  to  the  business,  she  would  be  given  a 
chance  against  Officer  Smith.  She  would  be 
called  to  the  witness  chair  and  under  oath 


NOCTURNE  31 

be  allowed  to  elaborate  on  the  obvious  lies 
which  constituted  her  usual  defence.  This 
would  give  her  the  opportunity,  between  the 
magistrate's  questions,  of  sweeping  the  court- 
room with  a  full,  hungry  look  for  as  much 
as  half  a  minute  at  a  time.  She  saw  the 
women  in  the  audience  only,  and  their 
clothes.  The  pity  in  their  eyes  did  not  move 
her,  because  she  was  not  in  the  least  interested 
in  what  they  thought,  but  in  how  they  looked 
and  what  they  wore.  They  were  part  of 
a  world  which  she  would  read  about  —  she 
read  very  little  —  in  the  society  columns  of 
the  Sunday  newspaper.  They  were  the 
women  around  whom  headlines  were  written 
and  whose  pictures  were  printed  frequently 
on  the  first  page. 

She  could  study  them  with  comparative 
leisure  in  the  Night  Court.  Outside  in  the 
course  of  her  daily  routine  she  might  catch 
an  occasional  glimpse  of  these  same  women, 
through  the  windows  of  a  passing  taxi,  or 
in  the  matinee  crowds,  or  going  in  and  out 
of  the  fashionable  shops.  But  her  work 


32  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

took  her  seldom  into  the  region  of  taxicabs 
and  fashionable  shops.  The  nature  of  her 
occupation  kept  her  to  furtive  corners  and 
the  dark  side  of  streets.  Nor  was  she  at  such 
times  in  the  mood  for  just  appreciation  of  the 
beautiful  things  in  life.  More  than  any 
other  walk  of  life,  hers  was  of  an  exacting 
nature,  calling  for  intense  powers  of  con- 
centration both  as  regards  the  public  and 
the  police.  It  was  different  in  the  Night 
Court.  Here,  having  nothing  to  fear  and 
nothing  out  of  the  usual  to  hope  for,  she 
might  give  herself  up  to  the  aesthetic  contem- 
plation of  a  beautiful  world  of  which,  at  any 
other  time,  she  could  catch  mere  fugitive  as- 
pects. 

Sometimes  I  wonder  why  people  think 
that  life  is  only  what  they  see  and  hear,  and 
not  what  they  read  of.  Take  the  Night 
Court.  The  visitor  really  sees  nothing  and 
hears  nothing  that  he  has  not  read  a  thou- 
sand times  in  his  newspaper  and  had  it  de- 
scribed in  greater  detail  and  with  better- 
trained  powers  of  observation  than  he  can 


NOCTURNE  33 

bring  to  bear  in  person.  What  new  phase 
of  life  is  revealed  by  seeing  in  the  body, 
say,  a  dozen  practitioners  of  a  trade 
of  whom  we  know  there  are  several  tens  of 
thousands  in  New  York?  They  have  been 
described  by  the  human-interest  reporters, 
analysed  by  the  statisticians,  defended  by  the 
social  revolutionaries,  and  explained  away 
by  the  optimists.  For  that  matter,  to  the 
faithful  reader  of  the  newspapers,  daily  and 
Sunday,  what  can  there  be  new  in  this  world 
from  the  Pyramids  by  moonlight  to  the  habits 
of  the  night  prowler  ?  Can  the  upper  classes 
really  acquire  for  themselves,  through  slum- 
ming parties  and  visits  to  the  Night  Court, 
anything  like  the  knowledge  that  books  and 
newspapers  can  furnish  them?  Can  the 
lower  classes  ever  hope  to  obtain  that  com- 
plete view  of  the  Fifth  Avenue  set  which  the 
Sunday  columns  offer  them?  And  yet  there 
the  case  stands:  only  by  seeing  and  hearing 
for  ourselves,  however  imperfectly,  do  we 
get  the  sense  of  reality. 

That  is  why  our  criminal  courts  are  prob- 


34  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ably  our  most  influential  schools  of  democ- 
racy. More  than  our  settlement  houses, 
more  than  our  subsidised  dancing-schools 
for  shop-girls,  tjiey  encourage  the  get-to- 
gether process  through  which  one-half  the 
world  learns  how  the  other  half  lives.  On 
either  side  of  the  railing  of  the  prisoners' 
cage  is  an  audience  and  a  stage. 

That  is  why  she  would  look  forward  to 
her  regular  visits  at  the  Night  Court.  She 
saw  life  there. 


V 

HAROLD'S  SOUL,  I 

I  AGREE  with  the  publishers  of  Miss  Am- 
arylis  Pater's  book,  "  The  New  Mother- 
hood," that  the  subject  is  one  which  cannot 
possibly  be  ignored.  I  have  not  only  read 
the  book,  but  I  have  discussed  it  with  Mrs. 
Hogan,  and  with  my  eldest  son  Harold,  who 
will  be  seven  next  June.  As  a  result  I  am 
confronted  with  certain  remarkable  differ- 
ences of  opinion. 

Twenty  years  ago,  as  I  plainly  recall, 
the  Sacred  Function  of  Motherhood  was  not 
a  topic  of  popular  interest.  There  were  a 
great  many  mothers  then,  of  course,  and 
there  were  unquestionably  many  more 
children  than  there  are  to-day.  People,  as 
a  rule,  spoke  of  their  mothers  with  fondness, 
and  sometimes  even  with  reverence.  The 
habit  had  been  forming  for  several  thousand 

years,   in   the    course    of    which   poets    and 
35 


36  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

painters  never  grew  tired  of  describing 
mothers  who  were  engaged  in  such  •  highly 
useful  occupations  as  bending  over  cradles, 
watching  by  sick-beds,  baking,  mending, 
teaching,  laughing  in  play-rooms,  weeping  at 
the  Cross,  manipulating  with  equal  dexterity 
the  precious  vials  of  love  and  sacrifice  and 
the  carpet  slipper  of  justice.  But  though 
people  had  thus  got  into  the  way  of  accept- 
ing their  mothers  as  an  essential  part  in  the 
scheme  of  things,  they  rarely  thought  it 
necessary  to  write  to  the  editor  about  the 
Sacred  Function  of  Motherhood.  I  mean  in 
the  impersonal,  scientific  sense  in  which  Am- 
arylis  Pater  uses  the  phrase. 

Life  in  general  was  a  pitifully  unorgan- 
ised, rule-of-thumb  affair  in  those  days. 
People  fell  in  love  because  every  one  was  do- 
ing it  and  without  any  expressed  intention 
to  advance  the  purposes  of  Evolution.  They 
did  not  marry  because  they  were  anxious 
to  render  social  service;  but  waited  only  till 
they  had  saved  up  enough  to  furnish  a  home. 
They  bore  children  without  regard  to  the 


HAROLD'S  SOUL  37! 

future  of  the  race.  When  the  child  came 
it  was  not  a  sociological  event.  The  family 
did  not  consider  the  occurrence  sacred,  as 
Miss  Vivian  Holborn  insists  on  calling  it 
in  her  frequent  communications  to  the  press. 
The  family  contented  itself  with  wishing  the 
mother  well  and  hoping  the  baby  would  not 
look  too  much  like  its  father. 

Here  I  thought  it  would  be  well  to  confirm 
my  own  impressions  by  the  testimony  of  a 
competent  witness.  So  I  turned  and  called 
through  the  open  door  into  the  dining-room. 

"  Mrs.  Hogan,"  I  said,  "  what  do  you 
think  of  the  Sacred  Function  of  Mother- 
hood? " 

"What  do  I  think  of  what?"  said  Mrs. 
Hogan. 

"  Of  the  Sacred  Function  of  Motherhood," 
I  repeated,  rather  timidly. 

She  looked  at  me  with  a  distrustful  eye,  her 
broom  suspended  in  midair. 

Mrs.  Hogan  comes  in  once  a  week  to  help 
out.  Distrust  is  her  chronic  attitude  to- 
ward me.  She  has  all  of  the  busy  woman's 


38  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

aversion  for  a  man  about  the  house  while 
domestic  operations  are  under  way.  But  be- 
sides, she  cannot  quite  understand  why  a  full- 
grown  and  able-bodied  man  should  be  lolling 
at  his  desk,  pen  in  hand,  when  he  ought  to 
be  downtown  working  for  his  family.  She 
is  aware,  of  course,  that  all  the  members  of 
my  family  are  well-nourished,  decently 
dressed,  and  apparently  quite  happy.  But 
that  only  renders  the  source  of  my  income 
all  the  more  dubious.  When  any  one  asks 
Mrs.  Hogan  how  many  children  she  has,  she 
stares  for  some  time  at  the  ceiling  before  re- 
plying. From  which  I  gather  that  there 
must  be  several. 

"  I  refer  to  the  business  of  being  a  mother, 
Mrs.  Hogan.  Have  you  never  felt  what  a 
sacred  thing  that  is  ?  " 

"  An'  what  would  there  be  sacred  about 
the  same?  "  she  asked,  seeing  that  I  was  quite 
serious.  "  Bearin'  a  child  every  other  year, 
an'  nursin'  them,  an'  bringin'  them  through 
sickness,  an'  stayin'  up  nights  to  sew  an' 
wash  an'  darn,  an'  drivin'  them  out  to 


HAROLD'S  SOUL  39 

school,  an'  goin'  out  by  the  day's  wurrk, 
where's  the  time  for  anythin'  sacred  to  come 
into  the  life  of  a  woman?  " 

"  Just  the  same  it  does,"  I  said. 
"  Motherhood,  Mrs.  Hogan,  is  so  holy  a 
thing  nowadays  that  a  great  many  women  are 
afraid  to  touch  it,  preferring  to  write  in  the 
magazines  about  it.  Are  you  aware  that 
when  you  married  Mr.  Hogan  you  were  per- 
forming an  act  of  social  service?  " 

"  I  was  not  that,"  said  Mrs.  Hogan,  "  I 
was  doin*  a  service  to  Jim,  besides  plazin' 
myself.  'Twas  himself  needed  some  one  to 
take  care  of  him." 

"  But  that  would  mean,"  I  said,  "  that 
you  were  false  to  your  own  highest  self.  If 
you  had  read  Miss  Pater's  book  you  would 
know  that  any  marriage  entered  into  without 
the  sense  of  social  service  merely  means  that 
a  woman  is  selling  herself  to  a  man  for  life 
for  the  mere  price  of  maintenance." 

"  When  I  married  Jim,"  said  Mrs.  Hogan, 
"  he  was  after  being  out  of  a  job  for  six 
months." 


40  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

She  went  back  to  her  work  more  than  ever 
puzzled  why  my  wife  and  the  children  should 
look  so  well  taken  care  of. 

In  those  days  —  I  mean  about  the  time 
Mrs.  Hogan  was  married  to  Jim,  and  I  was  at 
college  constructing  my  world  of  ideas  out 
of  the  now  forgotten  books  which  Mr.  Gaynor 
was  always  quoting  —  I  recall  distinctly  that 
the  sacred  things  were  also  the  secret  things. 
What  burned  hot  in  the  heart  was  allowed 
to  rest  deep  in  the  heart.  Partly  this  was 
because  of  a  common  habit  of  reticence 
which  we  have  so  fortunately  outgrown.  But 
another  reason  must  have  been  that  life  then, 
as  I  have  said,  was  imperfectly  organised. 
To-day  we  have  applied  the  principle  of  the 
division  of  labour  so  that  we  no  longer  expect 
the  same  person  to  do  the  work  of  the  world 
and  to  feel  its  sacred  significance.  Thus, 
to-day  there  are  women  who  are  mothers 
and  other  women  who  proclaim  the  sacred 
function  of  motherhood.  To-day  there  are 
women  who  bring  up  their  children,  and  other 
women  who,  at  the  slightest  provocation,  thrill 


HAROLD'S   SOUL  41 

to  the  clear,  immortal  soul  that  looks  out  of 
the  innocent  eyes  of  childhood. 

At  this  moment  the  clear,  immortal  soul  of 
my  boy,  Harold,  finds  utterance  in  a  suc- 
cession of  blood-curdling  howls.  He  is 
playing  Indians  again.  The  wailing  accom- 
paniment in  high  falsetto  emanates  from  the 
immortal  soul  of  the  baby.  Those  two  im- 
mortalities are  at  it  again. 

I  call  out,  "Harold!" 

There  is  a  silence. 

"Harold!" 

With  extreme  deliberation  he  appears  in 
the  doorway.  I  recognise  him  largely  by  in- 
tuition, so  utterly  smeared  up  is  he  from 
crawling  in  single  file  the  entire  length  of  the 
hall  on  his  stomach.  Beneath  that  thick  de- 
posit of  rich  alluvial  soil  I  assume  that  my 
son  exists.  I  ask  him  what  he  has  been  do- 
ing with  the  baby. 

He  had  been  doing  nothing  at  all.  He  had 
merely  tied  her  by  one  leg  to  a  chair  and  pre- 
tended to  scalp  her  with  a  pair  of  ninepins. 
He  had  performed  a  war  dance  around  her 


42  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

and  every  time  his  ritual  progress  brought 
him  face  to  face  with  the  baby  he  made  be- 
lieve to  brain  her,  but  he  only  meant  to  see 
how  near  he  could  come  without  actually 
touching  her,  and  he  would  strike  the  chair 
instead.  He  didn't  know  why  the  baby 
shrieked. 

"  Harold,"  I  said,  "  do  you  feel  the  sacred 
innocence  of  childhood  brooding  in  you?  " 

He  was  alarmed,  but  bravely  attempted  a 
smile. 

"Ah,  father!"  he  said. 

I  looked  at  him  severely. 

"  Do  you  know  what  I  ought  to  do  to  you 
in  the  name  of  the  New  Parenthood?  " 

"  Ah,  father !  "  and  his  lip  trembled. 

"  You  are  a  disgrace  to  the  eternal  spark 
in  you,"  I  said. 

He  lowered  his  head  and  began  to  cry.  It 
required  an  effort  to  be  stern,  but  I  persisted. 

"  Harold,"  I  said,  "  you  will  go  into  your 
room  and  stand  in  the  corner  for  ten  minutes. 
Close  the  door  behind  you.  I  will  tell  you 
when  time  is  up." 


HAROLD'S  SOUL  43 

He  dragged  himself  away  heartbroken  and 
I  found  it  was  useless  trying  to  write  any 
more.  I  had  made  two  people  utterly  mis- 
erable. I  threw  down  my  pen  and  rose  to 
take  a  book  from  the  shelf,  but  stopped  in  the 
act.  Out  of  Harold's  room  came  music.  I 
stole  to  the  door  and  looked  in.  He  had  not 
disobeyed  orders.  He  had  merely  dressed 
himself  in  one  of  the  nurse's  aprons  and  the 
baby's  cap,  and  standing  erect  in  his  corner, 
he  sang  "  Dixie,"  with  all  the  fervour  of  his 
fresh  young  voice. 

About  his  appearance  there  was  nothing 
sacred. 


VI 

EDUCATIONAL 

HAJ,F-MINUTE  lessons   fdr   up-to-the-minute 
thinkers : 

I.       WORD    STUDY 

CHILD,  noun;  a  student  of  sex  hygiene;  a 
member  of  boy  scout  organisations  and  girls' 
camp-fire  organisations  for  the  practice  of 
the  kind  of  self-control  that  parents  fail  to 
exercise;  a  member  of  school  republics  for 
the  study  of  politics  while  father  reads  the 
sporting  page;  a  ward  of  the  State;  a  stu- 
dent of  the  phenomena  of  alcoholism ;  a  handi- 
cap carefully  avoided  by  specialists  in  child- 
study;  one-third  of  a  French  family;  the 
holder  of  an  inalienable  title  to  happiness 
which  the  Government  must  supply;  in  gen- 
eral, a  human  being  under  thirteen  years  of 
age  who  must  be  taught  everything  so  that 
he  will  be  surprised  at  nothing  when  he  is 

thirty  years  of  age.     The  ignorant  and  in- 
44 


EDUCATIONAL  45 

nocent  offspring  of  a  human  couple,  obs. 
Synonyms :  man-child ;  girl-child ;  love-child. 

MOTHERHOOD,  noun;  a  profession  once 
highly  esteemed,  but  rejected  by  modern 
spirits  as  too  frequently  automatic. 

MOTHER,  noun;  a  female  progenitor;  a 
term  often  employed  by  the  older  poets  in 
connection  with  the  ideas  of  love,  sacri- 
fice, and  holiness,  but  now  delicately  de- 
scribed by  writers  of  the  Harper's  Weekly 
temperament  as  being  synonymous  with  cow. 

EUGENICS,  noun;  a  condition  of  intense 
excitement  over  the  future  of  the  human 
race  among  those  who  are  doing  nothing  to 
perpetuate  it. 

LITERATURE,  noun;  see  SEX;  WHITE 
SLAVE. 

DRAMA,  noun;  see  SEX;  WHITE  SLAVE 

PUNCH,  noun;  see  DRAMA;  LITERATURE; 
MAGAZINE  ADVERTISING. 

ADENOIDS,  noun;  something  that  is  cut  out 
of  children. 

SOCIAL-MINDEDNESS,  noun;  something  that 
is  injected  into  children. 


46  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

II.       GEOGEAPHY 

ARGENTINA;  where  the  tango  comes  from. 

RUSSIA;  where  Anna  Pavlova  and  ritual 
murder  trials  come  from. 

PEKSIA;  where  the  harem  skirt  comes 
from,  and  other  fashions  eagerly  embraced 
by  a  generation  which  insists  that  woman 
shall  no  longer  be  man's  chattel  and  play- 
thing. 

AMERICA;  where  the  profits  of  all-night 
restaurants  in  Montmartre  come  from. 

ASSYRIA,  BABYLONIA,  EGYPT,  PERU,  YUCA- 
TAN, PATAGONIA;  where  the  decorations  for 
Broadway  lobster-palaces  come  from. 

EQUATOR  ;  the  earth's  waistline,  unfashion- 
ably  located  in  the  same  place  year  after 
year. 

TENDERLOIN;  where  the  world's  wisdom 
comes  from. 

CAMBRIDGE,  NEW  HAVEN,  PRINCETON, 
MORNINGSIDE  HEIGHTS  ;  the  sites  of  once 
celebrated  educational  institutions  whose 


EDUCATIONAL  47 

functions  have  now  been  taken  over  by 
theatre  managers  on  Broadway. 

UNDERWORLD;  the  world  now  uppermost. 

MOUNTAIN;  a  rugged  elevation  of  the 
earth's  surface  which  comes  to  every  self- 
constituted  little  prophet  when  he  snaps  his 
fingers, 

SEA;  where  we  are  all  at. 

MEXICO  CITY;  residence  of  Huerta,  the 
most  eminent  living  disciple  of  Nietzsche. 

BULGARIA;  a  nation  which  scornfully  re- 
jected peace  and  reaped  honour,  widows,  and 
orphans;  where  the  Servians  were  the  other 
day. 

SERVIA  ;  where  the  Bulgarians  may  be  next 
week. 

CHAUTAUQUA;  any  place  outside  the  of- 
fices of  the  State  Department. 

HI.       ARITHMETIC 

1.  A  ship  carrying  800  passengers  and 
crew  is  in  collision  off  the  banks  of  New- 
foundland, and  700  are  saved.  Describe  t^e 


48  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

method  by  which  the  Evening  Journal  com- 
putes 400  souls  lost. 

2.  The    salary    of   a   police   lieutenant   is 
about  $2,500  a  year.     At  what  rate  of  in- 
terest must  this  sum  be  invested  to  produce 
a   million   dollars'   worth   of   real   estate   in 
ten  years? 

3.  2-f- 2=4f.     Show  this  to  be  true  other- 
wise than  by  writing  a  four-act  play  with  its 
principal  scene  laid  in  a  house  of  ill  fame. 

4.  The  loss  to  the  nation  from  disease  has 
been    estimated    at    $200,000,000    a    year. 
Show  the  profit   that   would   accrue  to   the 
nation  from  abolishing  every  form  of  disease 
after  deducting  the  cost  of  maintaining  the 
dependent  widows  and  orphans  of  50,000  doc- 
tors who  have  starved  to  death. 

5.  In   a   certain   gubernatorial    campaign 
several   disinterested   gentlemen   contributed 
$10,000  each  to  the  campaign  fund;  yet  the 
total  of  campaign  contributions  was  a  little 
over  $5,000.     Explain  this. 

6.  If   you    were    called   upon   to   build    a 
bridge  to  the  moon,  which  would  you  rather 


EDUCATIONAL  49 

use,  the  total  number  of  postage  stamps  on 
rejected  magazine  contributions  laid  end  to 
end,  or  the  total  number  of  automobiles 
shipped  from  Detroit  placed  end  to  end? 

7.  In  a  recent  article  on  mortality  statis- 
tics  in    the    World,    the   writer    omitted    to 
divide  his  average  death  rate  by  2.     Was  his 
argument,  because  of  that,  two  times  as  con- 
vincing or  only  half  as  convincing? 

8.  Describe  the  modifications  in  the  laws 
of  arithmetic  introduced  by  Mr.  Thomas  W. 
Lawson. 

IV.       HISTOEY 

The  supporters  of  Mr.  Theodore  Roosevelt 
have  frequently  remarked  that  if  Abraham 
Lincoln  were  alive  to-day,  he  would  be  with 
them.  Uncle  Joe  Cannon  has  expressed  the 
conviction  that  Abraham  Lincoln  if  he  were 
alive  to-day  would  be  on  his  side.  Is  there 
anything  in  history  to  indicate  that  Abra- 
ham Lincoln,  great  man  though  he  was,  could 
be  in  two  places  at  the  same  time? 

Mention  three  Republican  administrations 
in  which  the  rainfall  was  twice  as  heavy  as 


50  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

in  any  Democratic  administration  since  1837, 
and  show  what  this  indicates  for  the  pros- 
perity of  the  country  under  Mr.  Woodrow 
Wilson. 

Julius  Caesar  is  said  to  have  been  in  the 
habit  of  dictating  to  three  secretaries  simul- 
taneously. How  does  this  compare  with  the 
literary  productivity  of  Mr.  Arnold  Bennett 
and  Mr.  Jack  London? 

At  the  last  meeting  of  the  Tammany 
aldermanic  convention  of  the  Fifth  Assembly 
District  a  speaker  declared  it  to  be  the  most 
momentous  event  in  the  history  of  the  world. 
Compare  the  Fifth  Assembly  District  con- 
vention with  (a)  the  battle  of  Marathon; 
(b)  the  meeting  of  the  States-General  at 
Versailles  in  1789;  (c)  the  signing  of  the 
Emancipation  Proclamation. 

v.     LOGIC 

Prove  that  the  department  store  is  the 
principal  cause  of  prostitution  by  showing 
that  the  department  store  is  fifty-six  years 


EDUCATIONAL  51 

old  and  the  social  evil  is  forty  thousand 
years  old. 

The  mortality  rate  in  municipal  foundling 
asylums  is  99^  per  cent.  Develop  this 
into  an  argument  for  the  maintenance  of  all 
children  by  the  State. 

Compare  the  arguments  advanced  in  at 
least  four  (4)  New  York  newspapers  to 
show  that  the  Giants  would  win  with  the 
reasons  given  in  the  same  newspapers  why  the 
Athletics  won. 

Compare  Richard  Pearson  Hobson's  last 
speech  on  the  Japanese  peril  with  Demos- 
thenes's  Oration  on  the  Crown. 

VI.       SCIENCE 

The  classification  of  the  sciences  has  al- 
ways presented  peculiar  difficulties,  but  a 
partial  list  would  include  the  following: 

Tonsorial  Science,         Sunday    Supplement 

Science, 

Science  of  Bricklay-     Domestic  Science, 
ing, 


52  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

Science     of     Cosmic  Bohemian        Science, 

Love, 

Science   of  Advertis-  Science  of  Sir  Oliver 

ing,  Lodge, 

Scranton,    Pa.,    Sci-  Science      of      Packy 

ence,  McFarland, 

Science  of  Puts  and  Science  of  Sexology, 

Calls, 
Anti-vivisectionist   Science,        Science. 


VII 

MORGAN 

WE  were  speaking  of  the  man  whose  career 
was  written  in  terms  of  huge  corporations  and 
incomparable  art  collections. 

"  What  a  life  it  was ! "  said  Cooper. 
"  From  his  office-desk  he  controlled  the  desti- 
nies of  one  hundred  million  people.  His 
leisure  hours  were  spent  amidst  the  garnered 
beauty  of  five  thousand  years.  Isn't  it  al- 
most an  intolerable  thought  that  the  same 
man  should  have  been  master  of  the  Stock 
Exchange  and  owner  of  that  marvellous  mu- 
seum in  white  marble  on  Thirty-sixth 
Street?  » 

"  Cooper,"  I  said,  "  you  sound  like  the 
I.  W.  W." 

"  I  am  that,"  he  retorted.  "  I  express  the 
Inexhaustible  Wonder  of  the  World  in  the 
face  of  this  thing  we  call  America.  A  nation 

devoted  to  the  principle  that  all  men  are  born 
63 


54  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

-^ 

equal  has  produced  the  perfect  type  of  finan- 
cial absolutism.  A  people  given  up  to  ma- 
terial aims  has  cornered  the  art  treasures  of 
the  ages.  Need  I  say  more?  " 

"  You  needn't,"  I  said.  "  You  have  al- 
ready touched  the  high-water  mark  in  lyri- 
cism." 

But  Harding  waved  me  aside. 

"  I  have  also  been  thinking  of  that  marble 
palace  on  Thirty-sixth  Street,"  he  said.  "  I 
can't  help  picturing  the  scene  there  on  that 
critical  night  in  the  fall  of  1907  when  Wall 
Street  was  rocking  to  its  foundations,  and  a 
haggard  group  of  millionaires  were  seeking 
a  way  to  stave  off  ruin.  I  imagine  the  glori- 
ous Old  Masters  looking  down  from  their 
frames  on  that  unhappy  assembly  of  New 
Masters  —  the  masters  of  our  wealth,  our 
credit,  our  entire  industrial  civilisation.  I 
imagine  Lorenzo  the  Magnificent  leaning  out 
from  the  canvas  and  calling  the  attention  of 
his  neighbour,  Grolier,  to  that  white-faced 
company  of  great  American  collectors.  The 


MORGAN  55 

perspiring  gentleman  at  the  head  of  the  table 
had  one  of  the  choicest  collections  of  trust 
companies  in  existence.  The  man  at  his  el- 
bow was  the  owner  of  an  unrivalled  collection 
of  copper  mines  and  smelters.  Facing  him 
was  an  amateur  who  had  gone  in  for  insur- 
ance companies.  Others  there  had  collected 
railroads,  or  national  banks,  or  holding  com- 
panies. .No  wonder  old  Lorenzo  was  moved 
at  the  prospect  of  so  many  matchless  accumu- 
lations, representing  the  devoted  labour  of 
years,  going  under  the  hammer.  Around  the 
walls  the  wonderful  First  Editions  stood  at 
attention  and  some  one  was  saying,  *  Natu- 
rally, on  the  security  of  your  first  mortgage 
bonds  — '  " 

"  Putting  poetry  aside,"  I  said  somewhat 
impatiently,  "  what  I  should  like  to  know  is 
whether  this  garnered  beauty  of  five  thousand 
years,  as  Cooper  calls  it,  really  has  any  mean- 
ing to  its  owners.  I  understand  that  most  of 
our  great  collections  are  bought  in  wholesale 
lots,  Shakespeare  folios  by  the  yard,  Chinese 


56  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

porcelains  by  the  roomful.  Does  a  man 
really  take  joy  in  his  art  treasures  in  such 
circumstances  ?  " 

"  Of  course  he  does,"  said  Cooper.  "  If 
we  buy  masterpieces  in  the  bulk,  that  again 
is  the  American  of  it.  I  am  certain  that  this 
man's  extraordinary  business  success  is  to  be 
explained  by  the  mental  stimulus  he  derived 
from  his  books  and  his  pictures.  His  busi- 
ness competitors  really  had  no  chance. 
Their  idea  of  recreation  was  yachts  or  cards 
or  roof-gardens.  But  he  found  rest  in  the 
presence  of  the  loveliest  dreams  of  dead  paint- 
ers and  poets.  Can't  you  see  how  a  man's 
imagination  in  such  surroundings  would  nat- 
urally expand  and  embrace  the  world?  No 
wonder  he  thought  in  billions  of  dollars. 
Why,  I  myself,  if  I  could  spend  half  an  hour 
before  a  Raphael  whose  radiant  beauty  brings 
the  tears  to  your  eyes,  could  go  out  and  float 
a  $100,000,000  corporation." 

"  Having  first  dried  your  tears,  of  course," 
I  suggested. 

"  Well,  yes,"  he  said. 


MORGAN  57 

Harding  had  been  showing  signs  of  impa- 
tience, a  common  trait  with  him  when  other 
people  are  speaking. 

"  When  a  rich  man  dies,"  he  said,  "  the  first 
thing  people  ask  is  what  will  the  stock  mar- 
ket do.  They  were  putting  that  question  last 
week.  Your  Wall  Street  broker  is  a  sensitive 
being.  Nothing  can  happen  at  the  other  end 
of  the  world  but  he  must  rush  out  and  sell 
or  buy  something.  Returning,  he  says  to  the 
junior  partner,  *  I  see  there  has  been  a  big 
battle  at  Scutari.  Where's  Scutari  and  what 
are  they  fighting  about  ?  '  '  Search  me,'  says 
the  junior  partner, '  but  I  think  you  did  right 
in  buying.'  '  I  sold,'  says  the  broker.  '  Who 
won  the  battle?  '  says  the  junior  partner.  '  I 
don't  recall,'  says  the  broker.  But  he  is  con- 
vinced that  no  big  battle  should  be  allowed  to 
pass  without  being  reflected  in  Wall  Street. 

"  But  that  is  not  what  I  wanted  to  say. 
Suppose  the  market  does  go  up  two  points  or 
loses  two  points.  What  is  the  effect  on  the 
Stock  Exchange  compared  with  the  crisis  that 
ensues  in  the  art  world  when  a  rich  American 


58  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

dies?  There's  where  things  begin  to  look 
panicky.  The  quotations  on  Rembrandts 
and  Van  Dycks  are  cut  in  two.  There  is  con- 
sternation in  London  auction  rooms  and  Ve- 
netian palaces.  In  some  half-ruined  little 
Italian  town  the  parish  council  has  almost 
made  up  its  mind  to  ship  to  New  York  the 
thirteenth-century  altar  piece  which  is  the 
glory  of  the  cathedral.  The  news  comes  that 
Croesus  is  dead  and  the  parish  authorities  see 
their  dreams  of  new  schools  and  a  new  chapel 
and  a  modern  water,  supply  vanish.  That  is 
the  crisis  worth  considering." 

"Not  to  speak,"  I  said,  "of  that  little 
shop  on  Fourth  Avenue  where  they  paint 
Botticellis." 

"  I  admit  that  Harding  has  made  a  very 
interesting  suggestion,  though  probably  with- 
out any  deliberate  intention  on  his  part,"  said 
Cooper.  "  This  steady  drain  by  Wall  Street 
upon  Europe's  art  treasures  is  a  civilising 
process  which  scarcely  receives  the  attention 
it  deserves,  except  when  some  Paris  editor 
loses  his  temper  and  calls  us  barbarians  and 


MORGAN  59 

despoilers.  I  am  not  sure  who  is  the  bar- 
barian, the  American  trust  magnate  who 
thinks  a  million  francs  is  not  too  much  for 
one  of  Raphael's  Madonnas,  or  the  scion  of 
Europe's  ancient  nobility  who  thinks  that  no 
Madonna  is  worth  keeping  if  you  can  get  a 
million  francs  for  it.  According  to  the  Eu- 
ropean idea,  the  proper  place  for  a  master- 
piece is  a  corner  of  the  lounging-room  where 
the  weary  guest,  after  a  hard  day  with  the 
hounds,  may  be  tempted  to  stare  at  the  can- 
vas for  a  moment  and  say,  *  Nice  little  daub, 
what? '  Their  masterpieces  are  made  to  be 
seldom  seen  and  never  heard  of. 

"  Now  see  what  we  do  with  the  same  pic- 
ture over  here.  Before  it  is  brought  into  the 
country  all  the  papers  have  cable  despatches 
about  it,  and  they  have  impressed  its  value  on 
the  public  mind  by  multiplying  the  real  price 
by  five.  Then  we  advertise  it  by  raising  the 
question  whether  it  is  genuine  or  a  fake. 
Then  we  put  it  into  a  museum  and  countless 
thousands  besiege  the  doorkeeper  and  ask 
which  is  the  way  to  the  million-dollar  picture. 


60  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

Then  the  Sunday  papers  print  a  reproduc- 
tion in  colours  suitable  for  framing,  but  it 
isn't  framed  very  often  because  the  baby  de- 
stroys it  while  papa  is  busy  with  the  comic 
supplement.  Then  the  New  York  correspond- 
ents of  the  Chicago  papers  write  columns 
about  the  picture.  Then  it  is  taken  up  by 
women's  clubs,  the  reading  circles,  and  the 
Chautauqua.  Before  the  process  is  com- 
pleted that  picture  has  entered  into  the  daily 
thought  and  speech  of  the  American  people." 

Harding  interrupted. 

"  The  members  of  the  European  nobility 
have  seldom  been  interested  in  art.  They 
have  been  too  busy  wearing  military  uniforms 
or  pursuing  the  elusive  fox  all  over  the  land- 
scape." 

"  But  that  is  just  the  point  I  was  making," 
said  Cooper  indignantly. 

"  Yes,  but  not  so  clearly  as  I  have  formu- 
lated it,"  said  Harding.  "  The  fact  is  that 
art  has  always  flourished  under  the  patronage 
of  the  merchant  class.  The  Athenians  were 


MORGAN  61 

a  trading  people.  Lorenzo  the  Magnificent 
came  from  a  family  of  pawn-brokers.  Rem- 
brandt sold  his  pictures  to  the  sturdy,  and 
quite  homely,  tea  and  coffee  merchants  of 
Holland.  It  is  preposterous  to  suppose  that 
because  a  man  is  lucky  in  the  stock  market 
he  is  incapable  of  appreciating  the  very  best 
things  in  art.  He  is  not  incapable;  only  he 
keeps  his  interests  separate.  From  ten  o'clock 
to  three  our  patron  of  the  arts  is  busy  down- 
town attending  to  the  unfortunate  financiers 
whom  he  has  caught  on  the  wrong  side  of  the 
market.  If  Cooper  here  were  a  Cubist 
painter,  and  you  gave  him  the  run  of  a  great 
art  collector's  front  office  on  settlement  day, 
he  could  produce  any  number  of  pictures  en- 
titled Nude  Speculator  Descending  a  Wall 
Street  Staircase." 

"  The  European  aristocracy  doesn't  al- 
ways despise  us,"  I  said.  "  Occasionally  an 
American  will  be  decorated  by  the  Grand 
Duke  of  Sonderklasse-Ganzgut  with  the  cross 
of  the  Bald  Eagle  of  the  Third  Class,  the 


62  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

person  thus  honoured  being  worth  nine  hun- 
dred million  dollars  and  the  area  of  the 
Prince's  dominions  being  eighty-nine  square 
miles." 


VIII 

THE  MODERN  INQUISITION 

QUESTIONNAIRE:     A  favourite  indoor  amuse- 
ment in  uplift  circles. 

His  eyes  were  bloodshot  and  he  stared  for- 
ward into  vacancy. 

"  We  were  married,"  he  said,  "  shortly 
after  I  was  graduated  from  law  school.  For 
just  five  years  we  were  happy.  We  were  in 
love.  I  was  making  good  in  my  profession. 
Helen  took  delight  in  her  household  duties 
and  her  baby.  Then  one  day  —  the  exact 
date  is  still  engraved  in  letters  of  fire  on  my 
memory  —  I  received  a  letter.  It  was  from 
the  Society  for  the  Propagation  of  Ethical 
Statistics.  It  said  that  a  study  was  being 
made  of  the  churchgoing  habits  of  college 
graduates,  and  there  was  a  printed  list  of 
questions  which  I  was  requested  to  answer. 
I  cannot  recall  the  entire  list,  but  these  were 

some  of  the  items : 

63 


64.  POST-IMPRESSIONS' 

"  Do  you  go  to  church  willingly  or  to 
please  your  wife? 

"  Do  you  stay  all  through  the  sermon? 

"  What  is  the  average  amount  you  deposit 
in  the  contribution  plate  (a)  in  summer;  (b) 
in  winter? 

"  Is  your  choice  of  a  particular  church  de- 
termined by  (a)  creed;  (b)  the  quality  of  the 
preaching;  (c)  ventilation? 

"  Are  you  ever  overtaken  by  sleep  during 
the  sermon,  and  if  so,  at  what  point  in  the 
sermon  do  you  most  readily  yield  to  the  in- 
fluence? (Note:  In  answering  this  question 
a  state  of  recurrent  drowsiness  is  to  be  con- 
sidered as  sleep.) 

"  Do  you  go  to  sleep  most  easily  under  (a) 
an  Episcopalian;  (b)  Presbyterian;  (c) 
Methodist;  (d)  Rabbi;  (e)  Ethical  Cultur- 
ist?  (Note:  Strike  out  all  but  one  of  the 
above  names.) 

"  Is  your  awakening  attended  by  a  sensa- 
tion of  remorse  or  merely  one  of  profound  as- 
tonishment ? 

"  What  do  you  consider  to  be  the  ideal 


THE   MODERN   INQUISITION       65 

length  for  a  sermon,  leaving  climatic  condi- 
tions out  of  account? 

"  I  tossed  the  letter  across  the  breakfast 
table  to  Helen  and  intimated  that  I  couldn't 
spare  the  time  for  an  answer.  But  Helen  in- 
sisted it  was  my  duty  as  a  college  graduate. 
If  the  science  of  sociology  couldn't  look  to  us 
men  of  culture  for  its  data,  whom  could  it  go 
to?  So  I  telephoned  down  to  the  office  that 
I  would  be  late  and  sat  down  to  draft  my  re- 
ply. It  was  much  more  difficult  than  I  imag- 
ined. I  was  amazed  to  find  how  little  I  knew 
of  my  own  habits  and  processes  of  thoughts. 
It  took  the  greater  part  of  the  morning,  and 
when  I  finally  did  get  down  to  the  office  I 
learned  that  my  most  important  client,  an 
aged  gentleman  of  uncertain  temper,  had 
gone  off  in  a  rage  saying  he  would  never 
come  back.  He  kept  his  word. 

"  That  letter  was  the  beginning.  I  had 
no  leisure  to  worry  over  this  loss  of  a  very 
considerable  part  of  my  income,  because  the 
next  morning's  mail  brought  a  letter  from  the 
Association  for  the  Encouragement  of  the 


66  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

City  Beautiful.  It  contained  a  very  long 
questionnaire  which  I  was  requested  to  fill  out 
and  forward  by  return  mail.  I  was  asked  to 
state  whether  the  character  of  the  telegraph 
poles  in  our  neighbourhood  was  such  as  to 
reflect  credit  on  the  civic  spirit  of  the  com- 
munity, in  respect  to  material  (a)  wood,  (b) 
ornamental  iron ;  and  secondly,  as  to  paint, 
(a)  yellow,  (b)  red,  (c)  green,  (d)  no  paint 
at  all.  I  was  also  to  say  whether  conditions 
in  our  neighbours'  back  yards  were  conducive 
to  the  propagation  of  the  typhoid-bearing  or 
common  house-fly  and  to  give  my  estimate  of 
the  number  of  flies  so  propagated  in  the 
course  of  a  week,  in  hundreds  of  thousands. 
Finally,  was  the  presence  of  the  house-fly  in 
our  community  due  to  the  negligence  of  in- 
dividual citizens,  or  was  it  the  direct  result 
of  inefficient  municipal  government?  And  if 
the  latter,  was  our  municipal  administration 
Republican  or  Democratic,  and  what  were 
the  popular  majorities  for  mayor  since  the 
Spanish- American  war? 

"  With  Helen's   assistance  I  managed  to 


THE  MODERN  INQUISITION       67 

send  off  my  reply  within  two  days.  But 
when  I  came  down  to  my  place  of  business  I 
found  that  I  had  missed  an  important  long- 
distance call  from  Chicago  which  the  office- 
boy  had  promised  to  transmit  to  me,  but 
failed  to  do  so  because  he  did  not  understand 
it  in  the  first  place." 

He  sighed  and  stared  at  the  floor.  His 
emaciated  fingers  beat  a  rapid  tattoo  on  my 
desk.  He  droned  on  in  dull,  impersonal 
tones,  as  if  this  story  of  the  wreck  of  a  man's 
happiness  had  no  special  concern  for  him. 

"  Well,"  he  said,  "  you  can  foresee  the  end 
for  yourself.  Within  less  than  two  months 
my  law  business  disappeared,  because  I  sim- 
ply could  not  devote  the  necessary  time  to  it. 
I  resorted  to  desperate  measures.  I  wrote  to 
our  alumni  secretary,  asking  him  to  remove 
my  name  from  the  college  catalogue;  but  it 
was  too  late.  My  name  was  by  this  time  the 
common  property  of  all  the  sociological  lab- 
oratories and  research  stations  in  the  coun- 
try. At  home,  want  began  to  stare  us  in  the 
face.  Worry  over  my  financial  condition, 


68  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

added  to  the  long  hours  of  labour  involved  in 
filling  out  questionnaires,  undermined  my 
health.  I  grew  morose,  ill-tempered,  curt  in 
my  behaviour  to  Helen  and  the  child.  We 
still  loved  each  other,  but  the  glow  and  ten- 
derness of  our  former  relations  had  disap- 
peared. 

"  Fortunately  Helen  did  not  feel  my  neg- 
lect as  she  might.  For  by  this  time  she,  too, 
was  getting  letters  from  sociological  experi- 
ment stations.  Helen  was  graduated  from  a 
New  England  college.  Her  letters,  at  first, 
dealt  with  problems  of  domestic  economy. 
She  had  to  write  out  model  dietaries,  state- 
ments of  weekly  expenses,  the  relative  merits 
of  white  and  coloured  help.  Later  she  was 
led  into  the  field  of  child  psychology.  Our 
little  Laura  was  hardly  able  to  go  out  into 
the  open  air,  because  her  mother  had  to  keep 
her  under  observation  during  so  many  hours 
of  the  day.  The  child  grew  pale  and  nerv- 
ous. Helen  grew  thin.  In  her  case,  poor 
girl,  it  was  actual  lack  of  food.  There  was 
no  money  in  the  house.  One  night  as  we  sat 


THE   MODERN  INQUISITION       69 

down  at  table  there  was  just  a  glass  of  milk 
and  a  slice  of  bread  and  butter  at  Laura's 
plate;  for  us  there  was  nothing.  At  first  I 
failed  to  understand.  Then  I  looked  at 
Helen  and  she  was  trying  to  smile  through  her 
tears." 

He  sobbed  and  I  turned  and  stared  out  of 
the  window. 

"  That  night,"  he  said,  "  I  went  out  and 
pawned  my  watch ;  my  great-grandfather  had 
worn  it.  People  rally  quickly  under  trouble, 
and  the  next  morning  we  were  fairly  cheerful. 
I  set  to  work  on  a  list  of  questions  from  the 
Bureau  of  Comparative  Eugenics.  Helen 
was  busy  with  a  questionnaire  on  Reaction 
Time  in  Children  Under  Six,  from  the  Psy- 
chological Department  at  Harvard.  I  was 
resigned.  I  looked  up  and  saw  Laura  play- 
ing with  her  alphabet  blocks.  I  thought: 
Well,  our  lives  may  be  spoiled,  but  there  is 
the  child.  Life  had  cast  no  shadow  on  the 
current  of  her  young  days.  At  that  moment 
the  hall-boy  brought  in  a  letter.  It  was  ad- 
dressed to  Miss  Laura  Smith  —  our  baby. 


70  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

It  was  from  the  Wisconsin  Laboratory  of 
Juvenile  ^Esthetics.  It  contained  a  list  of 
questions  for  the  child  to  answer.  How 
many  hours  a  day  did  she  play?  Did  she 
prefer  to  play  in  the  house  or  on  the  street? 
Did  she  look  into  shop  windows  when  she  was 
out  walking  or  at  moving-picture  posters? 
Was  she  afraid  of  dogs?  I  was  crushed. 
There  was  a  mist  before  my  eyes.  I  fell  for- 
ward on  the  table  and  wept." 

His  lip  trembled,  but  the  manhood  was 
not  gone  from  him.  He  faced  me  with  a 
show  of  firmness. 

"  Mind  you,"  he  said,  "  I  am  not  com- 
plaining. The  individual  must  suffer  if  the 
world  is  to  move  forward.  We  have  suffered, 
but  in  a  good  cause." 

I  agreed.  I  recalled  the  tabulated  results 
of  a  particularly  elaborate  questionnaire 
printed  in  the  morning's  news.  Questions  had 
been  sent  to  a  thousand  college  graduates. 
Of  that  number  it  appeared  that  480  lived  in 
the  country,  230  preferred  the  drama  to  fic- 
tion, 198  were  vegetarians,  and  576  voted  for 


THE  MODERN  INQUISITION      71 

Mr.  Wilson  at  the  last  Presidential  election. 
Those  who  voted  the  Democratic  ticket  were 
less  proficient  in  spelling  than  those  who 
foted  for  Colonel  Roosevelt.  Could  any- 
thing be  more  useful? 


IX 

THORNS  IN  THE  CUSHION 

I  HAVE  a  confession  to  make  and  I  have  my 
desk  to  clean  out.  One  is  as  hard  to  go  at  as 
the  other.  If  people  would  only  refrain  from 
putting  my^  books  and  papers  in  order  when- 
ever I  am  away,  I  could  always  find  things 
where  I  leave  them  and  the  embarrassment  I 
am  about  to  relate  would  have  been  spared 
me.  After  all,  there  is  efficiency  and  effi- 
ciency. If  the  book  I  need  at  any  moment  is 
always  buried  beneath  a  pile  of  foreign  news- 
papers, it  is  only  interfering  with  my  work 
to  haul  it  out  during  my  absence  and  put  it 
on  the  desk  right  in  front  of  me,  where  I  can- 
not see  it. 

It  was  at  Harding's  place  that  I  met  Dr. 
Gunther.  Harding  had  insisted  that  we  two 
ought  to  know  each  other.  After  I  had 
spent  half  an  hour  in  the  Doctor's  company 

I  agreed  that  had  been  worth  my  while;  the 

72 


THORNS  IN  THE   CUSHION      73 

rest  is  for  him  to  say.  Gunther  is  a  physi- 
cian of  high  standing,  but  his  hobby  is  as- 
tronomy, and  it  was  quite  evident  that  he  is 
as  big  an  expert  in  that  field  as  in  his  own 
profession.  We  spent  a  delightful  evening. 
As  he  rose  to  say  good-night,  Gunther  turned 
to  me  and  smiled  in  a  timid  fashion  that  was 
altogether  charming. 

"  I  must  confess,"  he  said  with  a  sort  of 
foreign  dignity  of  speech,  "  that  my  desire 
to  make  your  acquaintance  was  not  altogether 
disinterested.  I  have  here,"  pulling  a  large 
envelope  out  of  his  pocket,  "  a  few  remarks 
which  I  have  thrown  together  at  odd  mo- 
ments, and  which  it  occurred  to  me  might  be 
of  interest  to  your  readers.  It  is  on  a  sub- 
ject which  I  can  honestly  profess  to  know 
something  about.  Perhaps  you  might  pass  it 
on  to  your  editor  after  you  have  glanced 
through  it  and  decided  that  it  had  a  chance. 
In  case  it  is  found  unavailable  for  your  pur- 
poses, you  must  be  under  no  compunction 
about  sending  it  back.  You  see,  I  have  put 
the  manuscript  into  a  stamped  and  addressed 


74  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

envelope.  I  know  how  busy  you  journalists 
are." 

I  told  him  I  would  be  delighted  to  do  what 
I  could.  I  brought  the  manuscript  to  the  of- 
fice next  morning,  laid  it  on  my  desk,  and 
forgot  about  it.  It  was  a  Saturday.  After 
I  left  the  office,  the  janitor's  assistant,  being 
new  to  the  place,  came  in  and  cleaned  up  my 
room.  When  I  looked  for  the  paper  on  Mon- 
day, I  could  not  find  it.  At  first  I  was  not 
alarmed,  because  I  reasoned  that  in  the 
course  of  two  or  three  weeks  it  would  turn  up. 

But  this  was  evidently  Dr.  Gunther's  first 
experience  as  a  contributor  to  the  press. 
He  was  impatient.  Within  a  week  I  had  a 
letter  from  him,  dated  Boston,  where,  as  he 
explained,  he  had  been  called  on  a  matter  of 
private  business  which  would  keep  him  for 
some  time.  Without  at  all  wishing  to  seem 
importunate,  he  asked  whether  my  editor  had 
arrived  at  any  decision  with  regard  to  his 
manuscript.  It  was  a  vexing  situation.  I 
shrank  from  writing  and  confessing  how 
clumsy  I  had  been;  and  besides  the  paper 


THORNS  IN  THE   CUSHION      75 

was  likely  to  be  found  at  any  moment.  I  saw 
that  I  must  fight  for  time. 

What  I  am  about  to  say  will  confirm  many 
good  people  in  their  opinion  of  the  unscrupu- 
lous nature  of  the  newspaper  profession ;  but 
the  truth  must  be  told.  I  determined  to 
write  to  Dr.  Gunther  as  if  I  had  read  his  arti- 
cle. The  terrible  difficulty  was  that  I  did 
not  know  what  it  was  about.  I  was  fairly  sure 
it  had  to  do  with  one  of  two  things,  medicine 
or  astronomy.  He  had  said,  when  he  gave 
me  the  manuscript,  that  it  was  a  subject  on 
which  he  could  claim  special  knowledge.  But 
which  of  the  two  was  it?  For  some  time  I 
hesitated,  and  then  I  wrote  the  following  let- 
ter: 

"  Dear  Dr.  Gunther :  Before  giving  your 
valuable  paper  a  second  and  more  thorough 
reading,  I  must  bring  up  a  question  which 
suggests  itself  even  after  the  most  cursory 
examination.  It  is  this:  Will  your  article 
go  well  with  illustrations,  and  if  so  where  are 
they  to  be  had?  You  know  that  ours  is  a 
picture  supplement,  appealing  to  a  general 


76  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

audience,  and  there  is  every  chance  for  insert- 
ing illustrations  into  an  article  of  scientific 
nature  abounding  in  such  close-knit  argument 
as  you  present.  Of  course  there  is  not  the 
least  reason  for  haste  in  the  matter.  A  re- 
ply from  you  within  the  next  four  weeks  will 
be  in  time." 

Next  morning  I  found  a  telegram  from 
Boston  on  my  desk.  It  said :  "  Naturally  no 
objection  to  pictures.  Suggest  you  repro- 
duce some  of  the  illustrations  from  Lang- 
ley's  masterly  work  on  the  subject.  Gun- 
ther." 

My  ruse  had  succeeded.  I  was  prepared 
now  to  keep  up  a  fairly  active  correspondence 
until  the  missing  paper  was  found.  I  knew 
of  Samuel  Pierpont  Langley,  one  of  the 
greatest  of  American  astronomers  and  a  pio- 
neer of  aviation.  I  turned  to  the  encyclopae- 
dia to  see  which  one  of  Langley's  books  was 
likely  to  be  the  one  Gunther  had  in  mind. 
There,  before  me,  was  a  biographical  sketch 
of  John  Newport  Langley,  an  English  physi- 
ologist, who  had  published,  among  other 


THORNS  IN  THE   CUSHION      77 

things,  a  treatise  "  On  the  Liver,"  and  an- 
other "  On  the  Salivary  Glands."  I  recalled 
that  at  Harding's  house  Gunther,  after  an 
elaborate  discussion  of  the  present  state  of 
meteorology,  had  drifted  into  a  spirited  ti- 
rade against  the  evils  of  ill-cooked  and  un- 
digested food.  It  might  very  well  be  this 
paper  "  On  the  Salivary  Glands  "  that  Gun- 
ther had  in  mind. 

I  delayed  writing  as  long  as  I  could  while 
the  office  was  being  ransacked  for  the  missing 
article.  It  was  a  hopeless  search.  The 
manuscript  had  evidently  been  swept  away 
into  the  all-devouring  waste  basket,  another 
victim  to  mistaken  ideals  of  efficiency.  A  few 
days  later  came  a  long  and  friendly  letter 
from  Gunther.  Without  wishing  to  flatter 
me,  he  said  that  he  was  quite  as  much  inter- 
ested in  my  opinion  of  his  article  as  in  get- 
ting it  published.  He  hoped  to  hear  from 
me  at  my  very  earliest  convenience. 

I  waited  nearly  a  week,  and  yielding  to 
fate  wrote  as  follows: 

"  Dear  Dr.  Gunther :  The  article  is  alto- 


78  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

gether  admirable.  It  seems  to  me  that  there 
are  just  two  subjects  which  never  lose  their 
appeal  to  the  average  man.  One  is  the  food 
by  which  he  lives.  The  other  is  the  universe 
in  which  he  lives.  They  represent  the  oppo- 
site poles  in  his  nature,  one  being  no  less  im- 
portant than  the  other.  Let  the  primitive 
man  but  satisfy  the  cravings  of  his  stomach, 
and  his  awed  gaze  will  turn  to  the  illimitable 
glory  of  the  stars.  I  think  of  Pasteur's 
epoch-making  researches  into  the  processes 
of  food-fermentation  and  then  I  think  of 
Galileo.  If  you  ask  me  which  is  the  greater 
man,  I  will  say  frankly  I  do  not  know.  Your 
article  will  duly  appear  in  our  magazine, 
though  not  for  some  time.  In  the  meanwhile, 
it  may  be  that  additions  or  changes  will  sug- 
gest themselves  to  you.  Very  likely  you  have 
a  carbon  copy  of  your  manuscript  at  home. 
Make  such  alterations  as  you  see  fit  and  send 
the  new  manuscript  to  us  as  soon  as  you  are 
satisfied  with  it." 

The  foregoing  letter  was  addressed  to  Dr. 
Gunther  in  Boston.     Two  days  later  he  wrote 


THORNS  IN  THE   CUSHION      79 

from  his  home  address  in  New  York.  He 
said :  "  I  cannot  speak  adequately  of  the  con- 
sideration you  have  given  to  my  poor  literary 
effort.  Your  letter  offering  me  an  oppor- 
tunity to  revise  the  manuscript  reached  me 
just  before  I  left  for  New  York.  At  home  I 
found  the  original  article  awaiting  me,  in  my 
own  envelope.  Evidently  it  had  occurred  to 
you  that  I  might  not  have  a  copy  of  the  arti- 
cle at  hand  —  which  is  indeed  the  case  —  and 
so  you  hastened  to  Send  me  the  original." 

Of  course  the  envelope  containing  the  good 
Doctor's  manuscript  had  not  fallen  into  the 
hands  of  the  janitor  at  all.  It  had  caught 
the  quick  eye  of  our  conscientious  mail-boy, 
who  saw  his  duty  and  promptly  did  it.  It 
only  remains  for  me  to  persuade  the  manag- 
ing editor  to  print  the  article  when  it  comes 
back.  After  what  I  have  gone  through,  this 
should  not  be  difficult.  Our  readers,  there- 
fore, may  look  forward  to  a  masterly  article 
on  a  subject  of  great  interest.  Whether  it 
is  an  astronomical  article  or  a  pure  food  ar- 
ticle the  reader  will  learn  for  himself. 


X 

LOW-GRADE  CITIZENS 

COOPER  was  in  a  confidential  mood. 

"  Isn't  it  true,"  he  said,  "  that  once  so 
often  every  one  of  us  feels  impelled  to  go  out 
and  assassinate  a  college  professor?  " 

"  Why  shouldn't  one? "  said  Harding. 
"  No  one  would  miss  a  professor  except,  pos- 
sibly, his  wife  and  the  children." 

"  That's  just  it,  his  children,"  said  Cooper. 
"  That's  what  makes  a  man  hesitate.  The 
particular  college  professor  I  have  in  mind 
recently  published  an  article  on  Social  Deca- 
dence in  the  North  American  Review.  He 
deplored  the  tendency  among  our  well-to-do 
classes  toward  small  families.  At  the  same 
time  he  deplored  the  mistaken  zeal  of  our  low- 
income  classes  in  trying  to  more  than  make 
up  for  the  negligence  of  their  betters.  He 
said,  4  The  American  population  may,  there- 
fore, be  increasing  most  rapidly  from  that 
80 


LOW-GRADE  CITIZENS          81 

group  least  fitted  by  heredity  or  by  income 
to  develop  social  worth  in  their  offspring. 
Such  a  process  of  "  reversed  selection  "  must 
mean,  for  the  nation,  a  constant  decrease  in 
the  social  worth  of  each  succeeding  genera- 
tion.' He  brought  forward  a  good  many 
figures,  but  I  have  been  so  angry  that  I  am 
quite  unable  to  recall  what  they  are." 

"  In  that  case,"  Harding  said,  "  you 
should  lose  no  time  in  seeking  out  the  man 
and  slaying  him  before  his  side  of  the  case 
comes  back  to  you." 

"  People,"  said  Cooper,  with  that  happy 
gift  of  his  for  dropping  a  subject  to  suit  his 
own  convenience,  "  have  fallen  into  the  habit 
of  saying  that  the  art  of  letter-writing  is  ex- 
tinct. They  say  we  don't  write  the  way 
Madame  de  Sevigne  did  or  Charles  Lamb. 
This  is  not  true. 

"  For  instance,  on  April  26,  1913,  Charles 
Crawl,  a  low-income  American  residing  in  the 
soft-coal  districts  of  western  Pennsylvania, 
wrote  a  letter  which  I  have  not  been  able  to  get 
out  of  my  mind.  With  that  unhappy  predilec- 


82  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

tion  for  getting  into  tight  places  which  Is  one 
of  the  characteristics  of  our  improvident, 
low-income  classes,  Charles  Crawl  happened 
to  be  in  one  of  the  lower  workings  of  the  Cin- 
cinnati mine  when  an  explosion  of  gas  —  un- 
avoidable, as  in  all  mine  disasters  —  killed 
nearly  a  hundred  operatives.  Charles  Crawl 
escaped  injury,  but  after  creeping  through 
the  dark  for  two  days  he  felt  his  strength  go- 
ing from  him,  and  so,  with  a  piece  of  chalk, 
on  his  smudgy  overalls,  he  wrote  the  following 
letter : 

"  '  Good-bye,  my  children,  God  bless  you.' 
"  He  had  two  children,  which  for  a  man 
of  low  social  worth  was  doing  quite  well. 
But  on  the  other  hand  he  was  improvident 
enough  to  leave  his  children  without  a  mother. 
When  I  was  at  coljege,  my  instructor  in  rhet- 
oric was  always  saying  that  my  failure  to 
write  well  was  due  to  the  fact  that  I  had 
nothing  to  say ;  and  he  used  to  quote  passages 
from  Isaiah  to  show  how  the  thing  should  be 
done.  I  think  my  rhetoric  teacher  would 


LOW-GRADE   CITIZENS  83 

have  approved  of  Charles  Crawl's  epistolary 
style.  I  think  Isaiah  would  have." 

"  But  we  can't  all  of  us  work  in  the  mines," 
I  said. 

"  Therefore  it  is  not  to  you  that  America 
is  looking  for  the  development  of  an  episto- 
lary art,"  said  Cooper ;  "  an  art  in  which  we 
are  bound  to  take  first  place  long  before  our 
coal  deposits  are  exhausted.  Charles  Crawl 
had  his  predecessors.  In  November,  1909, 
Samuel  Howard  was  thoughtless  enough  to 
let  himself  be  killed,  with  several  hundred 
others,  in  the  St.  Paul's  mine  at  Cherry,  Illi- 
nois. He,  too,  left  a  letter  behind  him.  He 
wrote : 

If  I  am  dead,  give  my  diamond  ring  to  Mamie 
Robinson.  The  ring  is  at  the  post-office.  I  had 
it  sent  there.  The  only  thing  I  regret  is  my 
brother  that  could  help  mother  out  after  I  am 
dead  and  gone.  I  tried  my  best  to  get  out  and 
could  not. 

You  see,  being  a  low-income  man,  of  small  so- 
cial worth  and  pitifully  inefficient,  even  when 


84  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

he  did  his  best  to  get  out,  he  could  not.  But 
perhaps  the  subject  tires  you?  " 

"  You  might  as  well  go  on,"  said  Harding. 
"  If  you  finish  with  this  subject  you  will  have 
some  other  grievance." 

"  I  have  only  two  more  examples  of  the 
vulgar  epistolary  style  to  cite,"  said  Cooper. 
"  Strictly  speaking  one  of  them  is  not  a  let- 
ter. But  it  is  to  the  point.  On  the  night  of 
April  14,  1912,  an  Irishman  named  Dillon  of 
low  social  value,  in  fact  a  stoker,  happened  to 
be  swimming  in  the  North  Atlantic.  The 
Titanic  had  just  sunk  from  beneath  his  feet. 
But  perhaps  I  had  better  quote  the  testimony 
before  the  Mersey  Commission,  which,  being 
an  official  communication,  is  necessarily  un- 
answerable, as  the  late  Sir  W.  S.  Gilbert 
pointed  out: 

Then  he  [Dillon]  swam  away  from  the  noise 
and  came  across  Johnny  Bannon  on  a  grating  — 

From  the  fact  that  Johnny  Bannon  had  man- 
aged to  possess  himself  of  a  grating  we  are 
justified  in  concluding  that  he  was  a  man  of 


LOW-GRADE   CITIZENS           85 

somewhat  higher  social  worth  than  the  wit- 
ness, Dillon.  However, 

—  came  across  Johnny  Bannon  on  a  grating. 
He  said,  "  Cheero,  Johnny,"  and  Bannon  an- 
swered, "  I  am  all  right,  Paddy."  There  was 
not  room  on  the  grating  for  two,  and  Dillon, 
saying,  "  Well,  so  long,  Johnny,"  swam  off  — 

In  thus  leaving  Johnny  Bannon  in  undisputed 
possession  of  the  grating  you  see  that  Dillon 
once  more  wrote  himself  down  as  a  low-grade 
man  unfit  for  competitive  survival.  How- 
ever, 

— "  Well,  so  long,  Johnny,"  swam  off  in  the 
direction  of  a  star  where  Johnny  Bannon  had 
seen  a  flashlight. 

And  as  it  turned  out,  it  was,  indeed,  a  flash- 
light, and  Dillon  was  pulled  out  of  the  water 
to  go  on  stoking  and  accelerating  the  process 
of  national  decadence. 

"  My  last  letter,"  continued  Cooper,  "  was 
written  in  October,  1912,  in  the  Tombs.  The 
author  was  one  Frank  Cirofici,  known  to  the 
patrons  of  educational  moving-picture  shows 


86  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

all  over  the  country  as  Dago  Frank.  It 
was  addressed  to  one  Big  Jack  Zelig,  a  dis- 
tinguished ornament  of  our  Great  White 
Way,  cut  down  before  his  time  by  a  bullet 
from  behind.  Cirofici  wrote: 

I  know  the  night  I  heard  Jip  and  Lefty  were 
arrested  I  cried  like  a  little  baby. —  Dear  pal,  I 
have  more  faith  in  you  than  in  any  living  being 
in  this  country.  I  tell  you  the  truth  right  from 
my  heart.  I  don't  know  you  long,  Jack,  and  I 
think  if  it  wasn't  for  you,  I  don't  know  what 
would  happen  to  me.  Being  I  am  a  Dago,  of 
course,  you  don't  know  what  I  know." 

"  Please,"  said  Harding,  "  please  don't 
knock  a  hole  into  your  own  argument  by  ask- 
ing us  to  shed  tears  over  the  undefiled  wells 
of  purity  that  lie  deep  in  the  soul  of  the 
Bowery  gunman.  You  won't  contend  that 
Dago  Frank,  when  he  leaves  us,  will  be  a  loss 
to  the  nation." 

"  It  would  be  an  act  of  delusion  on  my 
part,"  said  Cooper,  "  to  expect  you  to  see 
what  I  am  driving  at  without  going  to  the 


LOW-GRADE   CITIZENS  87 

trouble  of  spelling  it  out  for  you,  Harding, 
even  if  you  do  belong  to  the  classes  of  su- 
perior social  worth.  What  I  want  to  express 
is  the  justifiable  wrath  which  possesses  me 
at  this  silly  habit  of  taking  a  pile  of  figures 
and  adding  them  up  and  dividing  by  three 
and  deducing  therefrom  scarlet  visions  of 
Decadence  and  the  fall  of  Rome  and  Trafal- 
gar, and  all  that  rot.  What  if  empires,  and 
republics,  and  incomes,  and  the  size  of  fami- 
lies do  rise  and  fall?  Does  the  soul  of  man 
decay?  Do  the  primitive  loyalties  decay? 
As  long  as  we  have  men  like  Charles  Crawl 
and  Samuel  Howard,  do  you  think  I  care 
whether  or  not  Harvard  graduates  neglect 
to  reproduce  their  kind?  The  soul  of  man, 
as  embodied  in  Dillon  with  his  '  So  long, 
Johnny,'  is  as  sound  to-day  as  it  was  ten 
thousand  years  ago,  before  the  human  race 
entered  on  its  decline  by  putting  on  clothes. 
And  Cirofici,  pouring  his  soul  out  to  his  'pal,' 
crying  like  a  child  over  those  poor  lambs, 
Lefty  Lewis  and  Gyp  the  Blood — " 


88  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

"  If  that's  what  you  mean,"  said  Harding 
with  suspicious  humility,  "  I  quite  agree  with 
you.  You  know,  I  have  often — " 

"  Once  you  agree  with  me,"  said  Cooper, 
"  I  don't  see  why  it  is  necessary  for  you  to 
continue." 


XI 

ROMANCE 

AT  5 :15  in  the  afternoon  of  an  exceptionally 
sultry  day  in  August,  John  P.  Wesley,  forty- 
seven  years  old,  in  business  at  No.  634  East 
Twenty-sixth  Street  as  a  jobber  in  tools  and 
hardware,  was  descending  the  stairs  to  the 
downtown  platform  of  the  Subway  at 
Twenty-eighth  Street,  when  it  occurred  to 
him  suddenly  how  odd  it  was  that  he  should 
be  going  home.  His  grip  tightened  on  the 
hand  rail  and  he  stopped  short  in  his  tracks, 
his  eyes  fixed  on  the  ground  in  pained  per- 
plexity. The  crowd  behind  him,  thrown 
back  upon  itself  by  this  abrupt  action,  halted 
only  for  a  moment  and  flowed  on.  Cheerful 
office-boys  looked  back  at  him  and  asked  what 
was  the  answer.  Stout  citizens  elbowed  him 
aside  without  apology.  But  Wesley  did  not 
mind.  .He  was  asking  himself  why  ,it  was 

that  the  end  of  the  day's  work  should  invari- 
89 


90  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ably  find  him  descending  the  stairs  to  the 
downtown  platform  of  the  Subway.  Was 
there  any  reason  for  doing  that,  other  than 
habit?  He  wondered  why  it  would  not  be 
just  as  reasonable  to  cross  the  avenue  and 
take  an  uptown  train  instead. 

Wesley  had  been  taking  the  downtown 
train  at  Twenty-eighth  Street  at  5 :15  in  the 
afternoon  ever  since  there  was  a  Subway. 
At  Brooklyn  Bridge  he  changed  to  an  express 
and  went  to  the  end  of  the  line.  At  the  end 
of  the  line  there  was  a  boat  which  took  him 
across  the  harbour.  At  the  end  of  the  boat 
ride  there  was  a  trolley  car  which  wound  its 
way  up  the  hill  and  through  streets  lined  with 
yellow-bricked,  easy-payment,  two-family 
houses,  out  into  the  open  country,  where  it 
dropped  him  at  a  cross  road.  At  the  end  of 
a  ten  minutes'  walk  there  was  a  new  house  of 
stucco  and  timber,  standing  away  from  the 
road,  its  angular  lines  revealing  mingled  as- 
pirations toward  the  Californian  bungalow 
and  the  English  Tudor.  In  the  house  lived 
a  tall,  slender,  grey-haired  woman  who  was 


ROMANCE  91 

Wesley's  wife,  and  two  young  girls  who  were 
his  daughters.  They  always  came  to  the 
door  when  his  footsteps  grated  on  the  garden 
path,  and  kissed  him  welcome.  After  dinner 
he  went  out  and  watered  the  lawn,  which, 
after  his  wife  and  the  girls,  he  loved  most. 
He  plied  the  hose  deliberately,  his  eye  alert 
for  bald  patches.  Of  late  the  lawn  had  not 
been  coming  on  well,  because  of  a  scorching 
sun  and  the  lack  of  rain.  A  quiet  chat  with 
his  wife  on  matters  of  domestic  economy  ush- 
ered in  the  end  of  a  busy  day.  At  the  end 
of  the  day  there  was  another  day  just  like  it. 

And  now,  motionless  in  the  crowd,  Wesley 
was  asking  whether  right  to  the  end  of  life 
this  succession  of  days  would  continue.  Why 
always  the  south-bound  train?  He  was 
aware  that  there  were  good  reasons  why. 
One  was  the  tall  grey-haired  woman  and  the 
two  young  girls  at  home  who  were  in  the 
habit  of  waiting  for  the  sound  of  his  footsteps 
on  the  garden  path.  They  were  his  life. 
But  apparently,  too,  there  must  be  life  along 


92  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

the  uptown  route  of  the  Interborough.  He 
wanted  to  run  amuck,  to  board  a  north-bound 
train  without  any  destination  in  mind,  and 
to  keep  on  as  far  as  his  heart  desired,  to  the 
very  end  perhaps,  to  Van  Cortlandt  Park, 
where  they  played  polo,  or  the  Bronx,  where 
there  was  a  botanical  museum  and  a  zoo. 
Even  if  he  went  only  as  far  as  Grand  Central 
Station,  it  would  be  an  act  of  magnificent 
daring. 

Wesley  climbed  to  the  street,  crossed 
Fourth  Avenue,  descended  to  the  uptown 
platform,  and  entered  a  train  without  stop- 
ping to  see  whether  it  was  Broadway  or 
Lenox  Avenue.  Already  he  was  thinking  of 
the  three  women  at  home  in  a  remote,  ob- 
jective mood.  They  would  be  waiting  for 
him,  no  doubt,  and  he  was  sorry,  but  what 
else  could  he  do?  He  was  not  his  own  mas- 
ter. Under  the  circumstances  it  was  a  com- 
fort to  know  that  all  three  of  them  were 
women  of  poise,  not  given  to  making  the 
worst  of  things,  and  with  enough  work  on 


ROMANCE  93 

their  hands  to  keep  them  from  worrying 
overmuch. 

Having  broken  the  great  habit  of  his  life 
by  taking  an  uptown  train  at  5 :15,  Wesley 
found  it  quite  natural  that  his  minor  habits 
should  fall  from  him  automatically.  He  did 
not  relax  into  his  seat  and  lose  himself  in 
the  evening  paper  after  his  usual  fashion. 
He  did  not  look  at  his  paper  at  all,  but  at 
the  people  about  him.  He  had  never  seen 
such  men  and  women  before,  so  fresh-tinted, 
so  outstanding,  so  electric.  He  seemed  to 
have  opened  his  eyes  on  a  mass  of  vivid 
colours  and  sharp  contours.  It  was  the 
same  sensation  he  experienced  when  he  used 
to  break  his  gold-rimmed  spectacles,  and 
after  he  had  groped  for  a  day  in  the  mists 
of  myopia,  a  new,  bright  world  would  leap 
out  at  him  through  the  new  lenses. 

Wesley  did  not  make  friends  easily.  In  a 
crowd  he  was  peculiarly  shy.  Now  he  grew 
garrulous.  At  first  his  innate  timidity  rose 
up  and  choked  him,  but  he  fought  it 


94  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

down.  He  turned  to  his  neighbour  on  the 
right,  a  thick-set,  clean-shaven  youth  who 
was  painfully  studying  the  comic  pictures  in 
his  evening  newspaper,  and  remarked,  in  a 
style  utterly  strange  to  him: 

"  Looks  very  much  like  the  Giants  had  the 
rag  cinched  ?  " 

The  thick-set  young  man,  whom  Wesley 
imagined  to  be  a  butcher's  assistant  or  some- 
thing of  the  sort,  looked  up  from  his  paper 
and  said,  "  It  certainly  does  seem  as  if  the 
New  York  team  had  established  its  title  to  the 
championship." 

Wesley  cleared  his  throat  again. 

"  When  it  comes  to  slugging  the  ball 
you've  got  to  hand  it  to  them,"  he  said. 

"  Assuredly,"  said  the  young  man,  fold- 
ing up  his  paper  with  the  evident  design  of 
continuing  the  conversation. 

Wesley  was  pleased  and  frightened.  He 
had  tasted  another  new  sensation.  He  had 
broken  through  the  frosty  reserve  of  twenty 
years  and  had  spoken  to  a  stranger  after  the 
free  and  easy  manner  of  men  who  make 


ROMANCE  95 

friends  in  Pullman  cars  and  at  lunch  coun- 
ters. And  the  stranger,  instead  of  repulsing 
him,  had  admitted  him,  at  the  very  first  at- 
tempt, into  the  fraternity  of  ordinary  peo- 
ple. It  was  pleasant  to  be  one  of  the  great 
democracy  of  the  crowd,  something  which 
Wesley  had  never  had  time  to  be.  But  on 
the  other  hand,  he  found  the  strain  of  con- 
versation telling  upon  him.  He  did  not 
know  how  to  go  on. 

The  stranger  went  out,  but  Wesley  did 
not  care.  He  was  lost  in  a  delicious  reverie, 
conscious  only  of  being  carried  forward  on 
free-beating  wings  into  a  wonderful,  un- 
known land.  The  grinding  of  wheels  and 
brakes  as  the  train  halted  at  a  station  and 
pulled  out  again  made  a  languorous,  soothing 
music.  The  train  clattered  out  of  the  tun- 
nel into  the  open  air,  and  Wesley  was  but 
dimly  aware  of  the  change  from  dark  to  twi- 
light. The  way  now  ran  through  a  region 
of  vague  apartment  houses.  There  were 
trees,  stretches  of  green  field  waiting  for  the 
builder,  and  here  or  there  a  colonial  manor 


96  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

house  with  sheltered  windows,  resigned  to  its 
fate.  Then  came  cottages  with  gardens. 
And  in  one  of  these  Wesley,  shocked  into 
acute  consciousness,  saw  a  man  with  a  rubber 
hose  watering  a  lawn.  Wesley  leaped  to  his 
feet. 

The  train  was  at  a  standstill  when  he 
awoke  to  the  extraordinary  fact  that  he  was 
twelve  miles  away  from  South  Ferry,  and 
going  in  the  wrong  direction.  The  impera- 
tive need  of  getting  home  as  soon  as  he  could 
overwhelmed  him.  He  dashed  for  the  door, 
but  it  slid  shut  in  his  face  and  the  train  pulled 
out.  His  fellow  passengers  grinned.  One 
of  the  most  amusing  things  in  the  world  is 
a  tardy  passenger  who  tries  to  fling  himself 
through  a  car  door  and  flattens  his  nose 
against  the  glass.  It  is  hard  to  say  why  the 
thing  is  amusing,  but  it  is.  Wesley  did  not 
know  that  he  was  being  laughed  at.  He 
merely  knew  that  he  must  go  home.  He  got 
out  at  the  next  station,  and  when  he  was 
seated  in  a  corner  of  the  south-bound  train, 
he  sighed  with  unutterable  relief.  He  was 


ROMANCE  97 

once  more  in  a  normal  world  where  trains 
ran  to  South  Ferry  instead  of  away  from  it. 
He  dropped  off  at  his  road  crossing,  just 
two  hours  late,  and  found  his  wife  waiting. 

They  walked  on  side  by  side  without  speak- 
ing, but  once  or  twice  she  turned  and  caught 
him  staring  at  her  with  a  peculiar  mixture 
of  wonder  and  unaccustomed  tenderness. 

Finally  he  broke  out. 

"  It's  good  to  see  you  again ! " 

She  laughed  and  was  happy.  His  voice 
stirred  in  her  memories  of  long  ago. 

"  It's  good  to  have  you  back,  dear,"  she 
said. 

"  But  you  really  look  remarkably  well," 
he  insisted. 

"  I  rested  this  afternoon." 

"  That's  what  you  should  do  every  day," 
he  said.  "  Look  at  that  old  maple  tree !  It 
hasn't  changed  a  bit !  " 

"  No,'*  she  said,  and  began  to  wonder. 

"  And  the  girls  are  well  ?  " 

"  Oh,  yes." 

"I  can  hardly  wait  till  I  see  them,"  he 


98  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

said ;  and  then,  to  save  himself,  "  I  guess  I 
am  getting  old,  Alice." 

"  You  are  younger  to-night  than  you  have 
been  for  a  long  time,"  she  said. 

Jennie  and  her  sister  were  waiting  for 
them  on  the  porch.  They  wondered  why 
father's  kiss  fell  so  warmly  on  their  cheeks. 
He  kissed  them  twice,  which  was  very  un- 
usual; but  being  discreet  young  women  they 
asked  no  questions.  After  dinner  Wesley 
went  out  to  look  at  the  lawn. 


XII 

WANDERLUST 

APRIL  sunlight  on  the  river  and  the  liners 
putting  out  to  sea.  Paris !  Florence !  the 
Alps !  the  Mediterranean !  I  turned  away  and 
let  my  thoughts  run  back  to  the  time  when 
Emmeline  and  I  were  in  the  habit  of  making, 
once  a  year,  the  trip  to  Prospect  Park  South. 
The  Subway  has  brought  this  delightful 
region  within  the  radius  of  ordinary  tourist 
travel,  though  I  am  told  that  the  element  of 
adventure  has  not  been  completely  eliminated, 
owing  to  the  necessity  of  transferring  at 
Atlantic  Avenue,  where  it  is  still  the  custom 
of  the  traffic  policemen  to  direct  passengers, 
to  the  wrong  car.  At  the  time  of  which  I 
am  speaking,  Prospect  Park  South  lay  off 
the  beaten  track,  but  the  difficulties  of  the 
venture  were  atoned  for  by  the  delight  of 
finding  one's  self,  at  the  journey's  end,  in  a 
world  of  new  impressions,  a  world  untouched 
99 


100  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

by  the  rush  and  clamour  of  our  own  days, 
and  steeped  in  the  colour  and  poetry  which 
Cook's,  cotton  goods,  and  the  cinemaiagp§P^* 
have  been  wiping  out  in  Europe  and  the  Near 
East. 

There  were  no  Baedekers  then  for  travel- 
lers to  Prospect  Park  South.  To-day  I 
presume  guide-books  and  maps  may  be  pur- 
chased at  the  Manhattan  end  of  the  Brook- 
lyn Bridge  if  people  still  go  by  that  route. 
We  did  without  guide-books  or  guides,  be- 
cause the  inhabitants  of  Prospect  Park 
South  were  a  kindly  folk  and  as  a  rule  would 
wait  for  visitors  at  the  trolley  stops,  with 
an  umbrella.  When  this  did  not  happen, 
we  asked  our  way  from  passers-by.  These 
were  always  strangers  who  had  lost  their 
way.  The  inhabitants  were  either  peace- 
fully at  home  or  waiting  at  the  trolley  stops. 
For  that*  matter  an  inhabitant,  when  en- 
countered by  rare  chance,  was  not  really  of 
assistance.  A  resident  always  referred  to 
streets  and  avenues  by  the  names  they  bore 
when  he  first  moved  in ;  and  inasmuch  as  the 


WANDERLUST  X01 

streets  in  Prospect  Park  South  are  renamed 
every  year  and  the  street  numbers  altered 

- 

at  the  same  time,  the  settlers,  who  would  find 
their  own  homes  by  intuition,  were  worse 
than  useless  as  guides.  On  the  other  hand, 
to  meet  a  stranger  who  was  lost  was  always 
a  help.  It  was  a  peculiarity  of  strangers 
who  were  lost  in  Prospect  Park  South  that 
they  would  always  be  passing  the  street  you 
were  looking  for,  while  you  in  turn  had  just 
turned  in  from  the  street  they  were  looking 
for,  so  that  an  exchange  of  information  was 
always  mutually  profitable. 

The  following  hints  for  travellers  to  Pros- 
pect Park  South  are  based  upon  our  ex- 
periences of  some  years  ago.  Those  who 
go  by  the  Interborough  tube  will  probably 
find  that  changed  conditions  have  rendered 
many  of  these  rules  obsolete.  But  for  those 
who  go  by  way  of  Brooklyn  Bridge  they  may 
still  be  of  some  value.  First  then  as  to 
dress.  As  a  rule  one  should  dress  for  Pros- 
pect Park  South  very  much  as  for  a  short 
run  to  Europe.  That  is  to  say,  woollens 


10£  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

are  always  preferable,  especially  in  the  rainy 
season  (which  in  Prospect  Park  South  is 
coextensive  with  the  visiting  season),  owing 

I  -^"""^l  in    |g  |     |     |'  O  /   '  O 

to  the  long  waits  between  cars.  It  is  true, 
as  I  have  said,  that  the  inhabitants  of  Pros- 
pect Park  South  are  accustomed  to  wait  at 
the  trolley  stations  with  an  umbrella,  and 
no  household  is  without  a  full  assortment  of 
old  mackintoshes  and  rubbers  to  lend  to  im- 
provident visitors  who  believed  the  weather 
reports  in  the  paper.  But  house  parties  in 
Prospect  Park  South  are  frequently  large 
and  there  may  not  be  enough  old  raincoats 
to  go  around.  A  light  overcoat,  an  um- 
brella, rubbers  or  a  pair  of  stout  shoes,  and 
a  pocket  electric  light  for  reading  names  on 
the  street  lamps  at  night,  will  be  found  suf- 
ficient for  the  ordinary  traveller. 

The  choice  of  route  is  important.  Those 
who,  like  us,  live  in  upper  Manhattan  may 
lay  their  plans  (excluding  the  Subway) 
either  for  the  Ninth  Avenue  L  or  the  Sixth 
Avenue  L.  As  far  south  as  Fifty-third 
Street  the  two  lines  coincide.  Below  Fifty- 


WANDERLUST  103 

third  Street  the  question  of  route  should  be 
determined  by  one's  personal  preferences  in 
the  matter  of  scenery;  though  not  entirely. 
Veteran  travellers  assure  me  that  there  is 
also  a  difference  in  comfort.  The  curves 
are  sharper  on  Sixth  Avenue,  but  there  are 
more  flat  wheels  on  the  Ninth  Avenue  line. 
According  as  the  tourist  is  susceptible  to 
lateral  or  vertical  disturbances  he  will  make 
his  choice.  The  front  and  rear  cars  are  to 
be  recommended  above  all  others  because  a 
seat  may  always  be  obtained.  I  recognise, 
however,  that  if  the  traveller  has  long  been 
a  resident  of  New  York  he  will  force  his  way 
into  the  middle  cars.  Then,  hanging  from  a 
strap,  he  may  curse  the  company  and  be  in 
turn  cursed  by  the  quick-tempered  gentle- 
man upon  whose  feet  he  is  standing. 

A  phrase-book  is  not  necessary.  The 
English  language  is  used  on  both  the  Sixth 
and  Ninth  Avenue  lines,  and  being  equally 
incomprehensible,  cannot  be  looked  up  in  a 
:'  dictionary.  Only  legal  currency  of  the 
United  States  is  accepted  at  the  ticket-of- 


104.  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

fices,  but  change  is  frequently  given  in 
Canadian  dimes.  It  is  convenient,  but  not 
essential,  to  supply  one's  self  with  reading 
matter  at  the  beginning  of  the  trip.  News- 
papers are  always  to  be  had  for  the  picking 
on  the  floor  of  the  cars.  The  question  of 
fresh  air,  a  topic  of  constant  unpleasant  con- 
troversy between  American  travellers  and 
Europeans  on  the  Continent,  need  not  con- 
cern the  traveller  here.  The  matter  is 
regulated  by  the  company  management  which 
/  keeps  the  windows  closed  in  summer  and 
open  in  winter.  Passengers  of  an  independ- 
ent turn  of  mind  will  be  wary  of  opening- 
windows  on  their  own  account.  The  sudden 
entrance  of  air  following  upon  the  heavy 
perspiration  induced  by  the  effort  has  been 
known  to  lead  to  pneumonia. 

With  these  few  general  considerations  in 

mind,  we  may  proceed  te  -giy.£_A~rapi4  -sketch 

of  the-  TOtrte  the  tourist  traverses.     As   we 

v"(  have   said,   down   to  Fifty- third   Street   the 

'-passenger  on  the  Sixth  Avenue  and  on  the 

Ninth  Avenue  will  pass   through   the   same 


WANDERLUST  105 

landscape.  As  the  train  makes  the  magnifi- 
cent curve  through  One  Hundred  and  Tenth 
Street  he  will  have  before  him  on  the  right 
the  towering  mass  of  the  Cathedral  of  St. 
John,  which  a  kindly  neighbour  will  tell  him 
is  Columbia  University,  and  on  the  left  the 
lovely,  wooded  heights  of  Central  Park, 
their  base  skirted  by  a  low  line  of  garages 
and  French  dyeing  establishments.  At 
Ninety-eighth  Street,  on  the  right,  is  a 
water  tower  of  red  brick,  which  probably 
has  the  distinction  of  being  the  tallest  water 
tower  on  Ninety-eighth  Street.  At  Seventy- 
seventh  Street  to  the  left  is  the  Museum  of 
Natural  History,  which  the  same  kindly  in- 
formant to  whom  we  have  referred  will  de- 
scribe as  the  Metropolitan  Museum  of  Art. 
On  every  cross  street  to  the  right  one  may 
catch  a  glimpse  of  the  beautiful  Riverside 
Drive  with  the  smoke  from  the  New  York 
Central's  freight  engines  rising  above  the 
trees. 

At  Fifty-third  Street  the   Sixth  Avenue 
trains  diverge  to  the  left  for  a  short  distance 


106  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

and  then,  turning  south  once  more,  carry 
the  traveller  through  a  region  heavily  over- 
grown with  skeleton  advertising  signs  of 
woman's  apparel  and  table  waters.  If  the 
Ninth  Avenue  route  is  selected  the  vista  is  one 
of  tenement  houses  and  factories.  At  Thirty- 
third  Street  is  the  new  Pennsylvania  Station, 
the  cost  of  which  the  same  kindly  neighbour 
will  exaggerate  by  several  hundred  millions 
of  dollars. 

Ten  blocks  further  down  are  the  buildings 
of  the  General  Theological  Seminary,  so 
beautiful  in  line  and  colour  that  no  resident 
of  New  York  ever  alludes  to  them.  A  few 
minutes  further  down  the  train  rounds  a 
curve  and  the  traveller,  if  he  goes  in  the 
early  morning,  as  every  visitor  to  Prospect 
Park  South  must,  catches  a  glimpse  of  the 
fairy  land  of  steeples  and  battlements  of 
lower  New  York,  a  Camelot  wreathed  with 
wisps  of  steam.  For  the  lover  of  scenery 
the  Ninth  Avenue  is  to  be  unhesitatingly  rec- 
ommended, whereas  the  Sixth  Avenue  route 
will  give  pleasure  to  the  citizen  who  takes 


WANDERLUST  10? 

pride  in  the  development  of  our  garment  in- 
dustries. 

I  have  no  space  to  describe  the  interesting 
views  to  be  had  while  crossing  Brooklyn 
Bridge.  I  can  only  mention  the  harbour 
with  the  sunlight  upon  it,  a  spectacle  of  love- 
liness for  which  New  York  will  be  forgiven 
much.  Straight  under  the  span  of  the 
bridge  is  the  pier  from  which  Colonel  Roose- 
velt set  sail  for  South  America.  On  the  left, 
close  to  the  edge  of  the  river,  is  the  beetling 
mass  of  sugar  refineries  famous  the  world 
over  as  the  scene  of  an  epoch-making  ex- 
periment in  modifying  the  law  of  gravitation, 
when  the  sugar  company  succeeded  in  weigh- 
ing in  three  thousand  pounds  of  sugar  to 
the  ton  and  paying  duty  on  the  smaller 
amount  to  the  United  States  Government. 

Of  the  trip  through  Brooklyn  to  Prospect 
Park  South  I  will  not  attempt  to  give  any 
description.  For  that  matter  I  will  not  pre- 
tend that  on  any  of  our  journeys  I  have 
carried  away  a  definite  idea  of  Brooklyn. 
For  that  a  lifetime  is  necessary. 


XIII 

UNREVISED  SCHEDULES 

LIFE'S  ironies  beset  us  whichever  way  we 
turn.  The  very  day  that  Woodrow  Wilson 
signed  the  tariff  bill,  I  discovered  that  Em- 
meline  is  a  Protectionist. 

Thrice  in  the  course  of  the  evening  I  al- 
luded, with  pretended  calm,  to  the  signing 
of  the  bill,  without  awakening  the  least  re- 
sponse in  Emmeline.  The  tariff  apparently 
had  no  meaning  to  her.  Thereupon  I  re- 
proached her  openly. 

"  It  is  characteristic  of  your  sex,"  I  said, 
"  not  to  betray  the  slightest  interest  in  a 
matter  that  comes  so  intimately  home  to  you. 
Here  is  a  bill  which  is  bound  to  affect  the 
problem  of  high  prices.  Every  woman  who 
carries  a  market  basket,  every  woman  who 
shops,  every  woman  who  has  the  management 
of  a  household  on  her  hands,  is  directly  con- 
cerned in  the  question  of  lower  tariff  duties. 
108 


UNREVISED  SCHEDULES       109 

Yet  I  dare  say  you  haven't  read  two  lines  on 
the  subject  in  your  newspaper." 

"What  have  we  been  paying  duties  on?  " 
she  said. 

"  On  everything,"  I  replied  with  spirit. 
"  Anchors,  for  instance.  We  have  been  pay- 
ing one  cent  a  pound  on  them.  That  means 
twenty  dollars  a  ton.  You  know  what  the 
average  anchor  weighs,  so  you  can  figure  out 
for  yourself  what  we  have  been  paying  out 
all  these  years  for  this  commodity  alone. 
We  have  been  paying  25  per  cent,  on  bunion 
plasters,  10  per  cent,  on  animals'  claws,  and 
25  per  cent,  on  teazels." 

"  But  we  hardly  ever  use  any  of  these 
things,"  she  said. 

"  I  was  simply  illustrating  the  iniquitous 
extremes  to  which  our  tariff  advocates  were 
prepared  to  go,"  I  said.  "  It  may  seem 
natural  to  put  a  duty  on  beef,  and  shoes,  and 
cotton  goods.  But  the  tariff  barons  were 
not  content.  Insatiable  greed  demanded 
that  a  tax  be  put  on  teazels." 

"  What  is  a  teazel?  "  she  said. 


110  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

"  I  am  not  sure  that  I  know,"  I  replied. 
"  But  that  just  illustrates  one  of  the 
favourite  methods  of  the  tariff  plunderers. 
It  consisted  in  slapping  a  stiff  duty  on 
articles  people  did  not  know  the  meaning  of 
and  so  would  pay  without  protest.  I  say 
teazels,  but,  of  course,  I  mean  meat,  and 
sugar,  and  cotton,  and  woollen  goods,  all  of 
which  things  will  soon  be  within  the  reach  of 
all.  I  should  imagine  that  women  would  be 
grateful  for  what  has  been  done  to  make  the 
living  problem  so  much  easier." 

"  Under  the  new  tariff  bill,"  she  said, 
"  will  there  still  be  only  twenty-four  hours  to 
the  day?" 

"  The  new  tariff  doesn't  repeal  the  laws 
of  astronomy,"  I  replied. 

"  That  is  what  I  was  thinking  when  you 
spoke  of  the  living  problem  being  made  easier 
for  us,"  she  said.  "  Putting  twelve  more 
hours  into  the  day  would  be  a  help.  Did 
the  old  tariff  have  a  big  duty  on  hanging  up 
pictures  ?  " 


UNREVISED  SCHEDULES       111 

"  I  don't  know  what  you  are  driving  at," 
I  said,  but  in  my  heart  I  thought  I  knew. 

"  I  mean,"  she  said,  "  around  moving  time. 
I  have  always  thought  there  must  be  a  very 
heavy  tax  on  every  picture  that  a  man  hangs 
up ;  or  rugs  — " 

I  decided  that  frivolity  was  the  best  way 
out  of  a  situation  that  had  suddenly  become 
menacing.  "  Usually  we  don't  hang  up 
rugs,"  I  said. 

"  That  may  be  an  oversight  on  our  part," 
she  replied.  "  Perhaps,  if  we  hung  up  rugs 
and  put  pictures  on  the  floor  it  might  ap- 
peal to  your  passion  for  romance.  You 
might  even  find  it  exhilarating." 

The  idea  seemed  to  fascinate  her. 

"  There  are  a  great  many  things,"  she 
went  on,  "  that  I  should  like  to  see  on  the 
free  list.  Seats  in  the  Subway,  for  instance. 
I  stood  up  all  the  way  from  Twenty-third 
Street  this  afternoon,  but  I  suppose  the  duty 
on  a  man's  giving  up  his  seat  to  a  woman  is 
prohibitive.  Then  there's  Mrs.  Flanagan 


112  POST-IMPEESSIONS 

who  comes  in  by  the  day.  She  has  a  baby 
who  is  teething  and  cries  all  night.  I  wish 
there  was  a  lower  duty  on  babies'  teeth,  so 
that  they  came  easier;  and  on  sleep  for 
mothers  who  have  to  go  out  by  the  day.  I 
also  wish  there  was  a  lower  duty  on  the 
whisky  that  her  husband  consumes.  She 
could  possibly  afford  to  stay  at  home  more 
than  she  does." 

"He'd  only  drink  himself  to  death,"  I 
said. 

But  she  was  not  paying  attention. 
"  There  might  be  a  lower  duty  on  efficient 
domestic  help.  It  would  be  a  relief." 

"  Foreign  household  help  are  not  under 
the  tariff  law  at  all,"  I  said.  "  They  come 
in  free." 

"  That's  what  the  girl  said  yesterday  when 
she  decided  to  quit,  an  hour  before  dinner. 
And  from  the  way  she  spoke  to  me  I  imagine 
that  her  language  also  came  in  free.  The 
more  I  think  of  it  the  fewer  advantages  I  can 
see  for  us  women  under  your  new  tariff  bill." 
And  then  the  bitter  truth  came  out.  "  I 


UNREVISED  SCHEDULES      118 

think  that  on  the  whole  I  am  in  favour  of  a 
high  tariff  on  most  things." 

"  You  are  in  favour  of  Protection,"  I 
stammered,  hardly  believing  my  senses. 

"  I  am  in  favour  of  protecting  domestic 
industry,"  said  Emmeline,  and  I  saw  that 
she  had  been  reading  the  newspapers  more 
carefully  than  I  imagined. 

The  protective  system  which  Emmeline 
outlined  to  me  that  evening  would  have  made 
Senator  Penrose  sob  for  joy.  One  of  the 
first  things  she  demanded  was  a  heavy  duty 
on  tobacco.  She  said  she  would  be  satis- 
fied with  a  flat  rate  of  100  per  cent,  on  the 
nasty  article,  with  a  super  tax  of  100  per 
cent,  on  all  half-smoked  cigars  left  lying 
around  the  house,  and  another  100  per  cent, 
on  cigar  ashes  and  half-burnt  matches.  Al- 
coholic spirits  should  be  totally  excluded. 
She  wanted  a  pretty  heavy  duty  on  rain- 
coats left  lying  on  chairs  when  they  should 
be  hung  up  on  the  proper  hook.  She  was 
also  in  favour  of  a  prohibitive  tax  on  all 
arguments  tending  to  prove  that  woman's 


114  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

natural  sphere  is  the  home.  Lodge  dues, 
club  dues,  and  the  practice  of  reading  news- 
papers at  the  breakfast  table  should  be 
heavily  taxed.  There  were  a  great  many 
other  schedules  she  proposed,  carrying  a 
minimum  duty  of  seventy-five  per  cent.  I 
cannot  pretend  to  remember  all,  but  my  im- 
pression is  that  plays  dealing  with  the  social 
evil  and  eugenics  were  among  them. 

By  this  time  it  will  be  apparent  that  Em- 
meline's  views  on  tariff  legislation  were  some- 
what confused.  She  evidently  made  no 
distinction  between  import  duties,  internal 
revenue  taxes,  and  the  police  power  of  the 
State.  Before  continuing  our  discussion  I 
therefore  insisted  that  we  restrict  debate  to 
the  specific  question  of  import  duties  and 
the  cost  of  living.  The  simple  fact  was  that 
we  had  now  changed  from  a  high-tariff  na- 
tion to  a  low-tariff  nation.  How  would  this 
affect  ourselves  and  our  neighbours? 

Thereupon  I  was  subjected  to  a  severe 
examination  as  to  tariffs  and  prices  in  other 
countries.  My  answers  were,  in  a  general 


UNREVISED   SCHEDULES      115 

fashion,  correct,  though  possibly  I  may  have 
confused  the  British  tariff  system  with  that 
of  Germany. 

"  From  your  statements,  so  far  as  I  can 
make  head  or  tail  out  of  them,"  said  Em- 
meline,  "  I  gather  that  in  protection  countries 
the  cost  of  food  and  clothing  and  rent  is 
always  just  a  little  ahead  of  wages  and 
salaries." 

"  You  have  followed  me  perfectly,"  I  said. 

"  Whereas  in  low-tariff  countries  people's 
wages  and  salaries  are  always  just  a  little 
behind  the  cost  of  food,  clothing,  and  shelter. 

"  That  is  due  to  quite  a  different  set  of 
causes,"  I  said. 

"  I  imagined,"  she  said,  "  that  the  causes 
must  be  other  than  those  you  mentioned. 
But  the  fact  remains  that  the  choice  which 
confronts  most  of  us  is  between  having  a  little 
less  than  we  need,  or  needing  a  little  more 
than  we  have.  If  that  is  so,  it  seems  to  me 
rather  a  waste  of  time  to  spend  —  did  you 
say  seventy-five  years  ?  —  in  revising  the 
tariff.  I  prefer  my  own  kind  of  tariff," 


116  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

"  And  the  cost  of  living?  "  I  said. 

"  My  kind  of  tariff  gets  much  nearer  to 
solving  that  problem,"  she  said. 

"  But  then,  why  Mrs.  Pankhurst?  "  I  said. 
"  If  the  making  of  laws  has  nothing  to  do 
with  the  comfort  of  life,  why  do  you  want  to 
vote?" 

"  Because  we  want  to  assert  our  equality 
by  sharing  your  illusions.  Besides,  we  can 
use  the  vote  to  bring  about  a  state  of  things 
when  voting  won't  be  necessary." 

On  further  thought,  Emmeline  is  not  a 
Protectionist;  she  is  an  Anarchist. 


XIV 

SOMEWHAT  CONFUSED 

HE  said: 

"  Last  night  my  wife  took  me  to  a  lecture 
on  Eugenics  and  the  Future.  The  night  be- 
fore, we  went  to  a  lecture  on  the  Social  Im- 
plications of  the  Tango.  I  enjoyed  them 
both  immensely.  Of  course,  after  a  long  day 
in  the  office,  I  am  rather  tired  in  the  even- 
ing. If  I  dozed  off  on  either  occasion  it 
must  have  been  just  for  a  moment.  I  fol- 
lowed the  arguments  perfectly." 

"  Are  you  converted  ?  "  I  said. 

He  pushed  his  derby  further  back  on  his 
head. 

"  Quite.  I  am  not  a  mule.  I  know  a  good 
argument)  when  I  see  one.  Now,  isn't  it 
true,  as  the  speaker  contended  last  night, 
that  the  human  animal,  taking  him  by  and 
large,  is  not  a  beautiful  object?  When  he 

isn't  bow-legged,  he  is  knock-kneed.     There 
117 


118  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

are  too  many  men  prematurely  bald.  There 
are  too  many  women  prematurely  wrinkled 
—  and  fat.  We  are  nothing  but  a  sham- 
bling, stoop-shouldered  race,  in  a  permanent 
state  of  ill-health.  In  summer  we  get  sun- 
struck.  In  winter  we  get  colds  in  the  head. 
Look  at  the  ancient  Greeks.  Is  there  any 
reason  why  we  cannot  produce  a  race  as 
healthy,  as  beautiful,  as  graceful  in  the  free 
play  of  muscle  and  limb?  An  erect,  supple, 
free-stepping  race,  breathing  deeply  of  life, 
looking  the  world  full  in  the  face,  daring 
everything,  afraid  of  nothing.  Our  bodies 
are  divine,  as  much  so  as  our  souls.  To  go 
on  being  a  race  of  physical  degenerates,  a 
snuffling,  wheezing,  perspiring  race  that  is  al- 
ways running  to  the  doctor,  is  mortal  sin; 
especially  when  the  remedy  is  close  at  hand." 

"  You  mean  eugenics  ?  "  I  said. 

"  No,"  he  said,  "  I  refer  to  the  tango. 
The  speaker  last  night  —  or  was  it  the  night 
before  ?  —  was  absolutely  convincing  on  the 
point.  I  am  sure  you  will  agree." 

To  make  sure  that  I  would  agree  he  inter- 


SOMEWHAT   CONFUSED        119 

rupted  me  just  as  I  opened  my  mouth  to 
frame  an  objection.  He  continued  rapidly: 

"  Take  this  matter  of  old  age.  There's 
no  reason  why  people  should  let  themselves 
grow  old,  is  there  now?  And  a  properly 
constituted  race  would  see  to  it  that  old  age 
was  postponed  indefinitely.  After  all,  when 
a  man  says  he  is  eighty  years  old  or  ninety 
years  old,  it  is  only  a  figure  of  speech.  Look 
at  Napoleon  winning  the  battle  of  Leipzig 
when  he  was  seventy-eight  years  old." 

"  I  never  heard  that  before,"  I  said.  "  I 
thought  Napoleon  lost  the  battle  of  Leipzig, 
and  when  he  died  — " 

"  It  may  have  been  Hannibal,"  he  said. 
"  At  that  point  I  may  possibly  have  dozed 
off.  But  the  principle  of  the  thing  is  the 
same.  Only  a  race  of  weaklings  will  suc- 
cumb to  the  ravages  of  time  without  making 
a  fight  for  it.  There  is  really  nothing  beau- 
tiful in  old  age.  You  sit  out  the  long  winter 
nights  by  the  fire.  Your  eyes  are  too  weak 
for  the  fine  print  in  the  evening  paper,  and 
when  you  ask  your  son  to  tell  you  about  the 


120  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

new  Currency  Law  he  grows  cross  and 
scolds  the  baby.  When  you  stop  to  buy  a 
ticket  in  the  Subway,  people  grow  impatient 
and  murmur  something  about  an  old  ladies' 
home.  It's  all  as  plain  as  daylight.  There 
is  no  reason  why  people,  as  soon  as  they 
get  to  be  sixty,  should  reconcile  themselves 
to  the  idea  of  debility,  warm  gruel,  and  chest 
protectors,  when  they  might  go  on  being 
young,  alert,  graceful,  full  of  the  joy  of  life, 
if  they  would  only  recognise  the  way  of  go- 
ing about  it." 

"  You  mean  the  tango  ?  "  I  said. 

"  No,"  he  said.  "  I  was  alluding  to 
eugenics." 

He  spoke  with  assurance,  but  from  the 
corner  of  his  eye  he  threw  me  a  wistful,  fugi- 
tive glance,  as  if  to  make  sure  from  my 
bearing  that  this  was  really  what  he  meant. 
I  did  not  contradict  him.  I  was  thinking 
of  his  wife.  For  the  first  time  in  my  ex- 
perience my  sympathies  were  with  the  tired 
business  man.  It  is  good  for  the  tired  busi- 
ness man  that  his  wife  shall  be  alive  to  the 


SOMEWHAT  CONFUSED        121 

things  that  count ;  but  two  nights  in  succes- 
sion is  rather  hard.  His  wife,  I  knew,  was 
alive  to  every  phase  of  our  intense  modern 
existence,  and  in  rapid  succession.  She  did 
not  precisely  burn  with  that  hard,  gemlike 
flame  which  Mr.  Pater  recommended.  Some- 
times I  thought  she  burned  with  a  sixty-four- 
candle  power  carbon  glow.  It  was  a  bit 
trying  on  the  eyes. 

\ 

"  Or  take  the  question  of  sex,"  he  said. 
"  What  is  there  in  sex  emotion  to  be  ashamed 
of?  It  is  the  most  primordial  of  feelings. 
It  comes  before  the  law  of  gravitation,  as 
the  speaker  showed  last  night." 

"  Does  it  though?  "  I  said. 

"  Well,"  he  said,  "  perhaps  it  was  the  night 
before  last.  Around  this  universal  urge,  of 
which  we  ought  to  be  proud,  as  the  most 
powerful  force  in  Evolution  (the  speaker 
last  night  was  sure  there  could  be  no  doubt 
on  the  subject),  we  have  built  up  an 
elaborate  structure  of  reticence  and  hypoc- 
risy. All  art,  all  literature,  is  of  significance 
only  as  it  emphasises  sex.  If  the  Bible  has 


122  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

impressed  itself  on  the  imagination  of  human- 
ity for  two  thousand  years,  it  is  because  it 
contains  the  most  beautiful  love  songs  in  all 
literature.  It  is  the  force  which  drives  the 
sun  in  its  course,  as  the  Italian  poet  has 
said.  It  has  been  the  inspiration  of  all  great 
deeds.  If  we  searched  deeply  enough,  we 
should  find  that  sex  was  the  inspiration  behind 
the  discovery  of  America,  the  invention  of 
printing,  and  the  building  of  the  Roman  aque- 
ducts. Only  the  most  benighted  ignorance 
will  permit  our  prudish  sentiments  on  the  sub- 
ject to  stand  in  the  way  of  a  movement  which 
is  sweeping  the  world  like  wildfire." 

"  Referring  to  eugenics  ?  "  I  said. 

"  No,"  he  said,  "  I  mean  the  tango." 

He  looked  out  of  the  window  and  pon- 
dered. 

"  Yes,"  he  said,  "  that  was  night  before 
last.  What  the  speaker  dwelt  upon  last 
night  was  the  subject  of  democracy.  At 
present  we  know  nothing  of  true  democracy, 
of  true  equality.  Society  is  divided  into 
classes  with  separate  codes  of  morals  and 


SOMEWHAT  CONFUSED        123 

standards  of  conduct.  There  are  rich  and 
poor;  workers  and  idlers;  meat  eaters  and 
vegetarians;  the  old  and  the  young;  the 
literate,  the  illiterate,  and  the  advocates  of 
simplified  spelling.  It  isn't  a  world  at  all; 
it  is  chaos.  In  the  end  it  all  resolves  itself 
into  this :  humanity  is  divided  into  the  strong 
and  the  weak.  The  surest  way  to  do  away 
with  inequality  is  to  produce  a  race  in  which 
every  member  is  strong." 

"  You  mean  — "  I  said. 

"  Pardon  me,"  he  said.  "  I  haven't 
finished.  Let  me  sum  up  the  speaker's  con- 
cluding sentence  as  I  recall  it.  As  we  look 
around  us  to-day  there  is  unmistakably  one 
force  which  works  for  the  elimination  of  that 
inequality  which  is  the  source  of  all  our 
troubles ;  a  force  which  wipes  out  all  distinc- 
tion of  class,  of  age,  and  of  education,  and 
produces  a  world  in  which  everybody  is  en- 
gaged in  doing  the  same  thing  as  everybody 
else." 

"  Oh,  I  see,"  I  said.  "  You  are  now  speak- 
ing of  the  tango." 


124  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

"  Not  at  all,"  he  said,  "  I  am  referring  to 
eugenics.  But  perhaps  you  do  not  agree 
with  me  ?  " 

I  hesitated.  He  was  watching  me  eagerly, 
pushing  his  derby  back  until  it  stood  upright 
on  its  tail  like  a  trained  seal. 

"  I  have  done  my  best  to  agree  with  you," 
I  said,  "  but  you  have  made  it  rather  dif- 
ficult for  me.  Nevertheless  I  do  agree  with 
you.  What  I  am  thinking  of  now  is  some- 
thing which  the  speaker  last  night  omitted 
to  mention  —  or  was  it  the  night  before 
last?  And  it  is  this.  Under  the  conditions 
which  you  describe,  how  beautifully  complex 
the  art  of  thinking  will  become.  At  present 
we  can  hardly  be  said  to  think  at  all.  We 
are  cowards.  We  crawl  along  from  one 
truth  to  another.  We  timidly  look  back  to 
our  premises  before  jumping  at  the  conclu- 
sion. We  are  horrified  by  inconsistencies. 
We  are  enslaved  by  facts  —  facts  of  nature, 
facts  of  human  nature,  facts  of  experience. 
How  different  it  will  all  be  when  we  can  side- 
step facts,  when  we  can  dip  over  incon- 


SOMEWHAT   CONFUSED        125 

sistencies,  when  we  can  hug  boldly  an  ap- 
parent contradiction  and  make  it  our  own; 
when  thinking,  in  short,  will  not  be  a  timid 
regulated  process,  but  a  succession  of  dips, 
twists,  gallops,  slides,  bends,  hurdles,  sprints, 
and  pole  vaults." 

"  You  are  thinking  of  the  tango  ?  "  he 
said. 

"  No,'*  I  replied.  "  I  had  eugenics  in 
mind." 


XV 

HAROLD'S  SOUL,  II 

You,  mothers  and  fathers  [said  this  partic- 
ular advertising  folder  which  I  found  in  my 
morning's  mail],  do  you  know  what  goes  on 
in  the  soul  of  your  child? 

I,  for  one,  know  very  little  of  what  goes 
on  inside  of  Harold.  My  information  on  the 
subject  would  hardly  furnish  material  for  a 
single  university  extension  lecture  on  child 
psychology.  It  is  an  imperfect,  unsystem- 
atised  knowledge  based  on  accidental 
glimpses  into  Harold's  soul,  odd  flashes  of 
self-revelation,  and  occasional  questions  the 
boy  will  put  to  me.  I  don't  know  whether 
Harold  is  more  reticent  than  the  average  boy 
in  the  second  elementary  grade,  but  in  his 
case  it  does  no  good  to  cross-examine.  He 
grows  confused,  suspicious,  and  afraid.  He 
resents  the  intrusion  of  my  rough  fingers  into 

his  sensitive  world  of  ideas,     So  I  clo  not  in- 
126 


HAROLD'S  SOUL  127 

sist  on  detailed  accounts  of  how  the  boy 
passes  his  time  in  class  or  at  play;  for  what 
are  time  and  space  and  grammatical  sequence 
to  the  child?  I  am  content  to  wait,  and 
now  and  then  I  make  discoveries. 

Harold  and  I  were  discussing  one  day  the 
rather  important  question,  raised  by  him- 
self, from  what  height  a  man  must  fall  down 
in  order  to  be  killed.  It  began,  I  think,  with 
umbrellas  and  how  they  behave  in  a  high 
wind.  From  that  we  passed  on  to  para- 
chutes and  balloons  and  the  loftier  mountain 
tops.  We  dwelt  for  some  time  upon  the  dif- 
ficulties and  dangers  of  mountaineering. 

"  Once  there  was  a  man,"  said  Harold, 
"  who  used  to  drive  six  mules  up  a  moun- 
tain." 

"  Six  mules,"  I  said.  "  How  do  you 
know?" 

"  A  bishop  told  me,"  he  said. 

The  sense  of  utter  helplessness  before  the 
closed  temple  of  Harold's  private  life  op- 
pressed me.  Let  alone  his  soul,  I  found  that 
I  did  not  even  know  how  the  boy  was  spenoV- 


128  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ing  his  time  and  who  his  associates  were. 
Fortunately,  in  this  case  it  was  a  bishop ;  but 
it  might  have  been  some  one  much  worse. 

And  why  had  Harold  never  spoken  of  his 
friend  the  bishop  until  our  talk  of  parachutes 
and  mountain  climbing  brought  forth  his  per- 
fectly matter-of-fact  statement?  Was  it  in- 
difference on  Harold's  part?  Was  it  studied 
reticence?  I  thought  with  a  pang  of  self- 
accusation  how  I  would  have  behaved,  after 
meeting  a  bishop;  how  I  would  have  turned 
the  conversation  at  the  dinner-table  to  the 
declining  influence  of  the  Church;  how  I 
would  have  found  a  way  of  comparing  the 
Woolworth  Building  with  ecclesiastical  ar- 
chitecture ;  how  I  might  have  steered  a  course 
from  golf  to  bridge  and  from  bridge  to  chess ; 
always  ending  with  a  careless  allusion  to 
what  the  bishop  said  when  we  met. 

There  was,  as  it  turned  out,  a  simple  ex- 
planation for  Harold's  statement.  A  nota- 
ble conclave  of  bishops  and  laymen  had  been 
in  session  for  some  days  in  our  neighbour- 
hood, and  one  of  the  visiting  dignitaries  had 


HAROLD'S   SOUL  129 

addressed  the  school  children  at  the  opening 
exercises  one  morning.  I  say  the  explana- 
tion is  simple,  though  it  is  largely  my  own 
hypothesis  based  on  Harold's  words  as  I 
have  given  them  above ;  but  I  believe  my  sup- 
position to  be  true.  With  regard  to  the  six 
mules  up  a  steep  mountain  I  am  not  so  sure ; 
but  probably  it  was  a  missionary  bishop  who 
entertained  the  children  with  an  account  of 
his  experiences  in  Montana  or  British  Colum- 
bia. What  else  the  bishop  told  them  Har- 
old could  not  say.  He  admitted,  regretfully, 
that  the  bishop  used  long  words. 

But  I  am  not  at  all  certain  that  other 
bits  of  information  from  that  ecclesiastical 
speech  have  not  lodged  in  Harold's  memory, 
to  be  brought  forward  on  some  utterly  unex- 
pected but  quite  appropriate  occasion.  In 
the  meanwhile  I  can  only  think  that  it  must 
be  a  very  fine  sort  of  bishop,  indeed,  who 
could  find  time  for  an  audience  of  school 
children  and  was  not  afraid  to  use  long 
words  in  their  presence.  As  I  can  testify, 
the  encounter  thus  brought  about  did  Harold 


130  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

good;  and  I  am  inclined  to  think  that  it  did 
the  bishop  good. 

We  finally  decided  that  no  man  could  fall 
from  a  height  over  one  hundred  and  fifty  feet 
and  reasonably  expect  to  live. 

You,  mothers  and  fathers  [this  advertis- 
ing folder  petulantly  insists],  can  you  ap- 
pease the  wonder  that  looks  out  of  the  eyes 
of  your  child? 

From  Harold's  eyes,  I  am  inclined  to 
think,  no  wondering  soul  looks  out.  The 
world  to  him  is  quite  as  it  should  be.  Every- 
thing fits  into  its  place.  Harold  does  not 
think  it  strange  that  a  bishop  should  address 
him  any  more  than  he  would  think  it  strange 
to  have  the  Kaiser  walk  into  the  class-room 
and  begin  to  do  sums  on  the  blackboard. 
Why  should  there  be  anything  to  puzzle  him  ? 
He  has  learned  no  rules  of  life  and  is,  there- 
fore, in  no  position  to  be  astonished  by  the 
exceptions  of  life.  If  only  you  are  unaware 
that  two  things  cannot  be  in  the  same  place 
at  the  same  time,  or  that  the  whole  is  greater 
than  any  of  its  parts,  the  world  becomes  a 


HAROLD'S  SOUL  131 

very  easy  thing  to  explain.  To  Harold 
everything  that  is,  is.  Everything  that  ap- 
pears to  be,  is.  Everything  that  he  would 
like  to  be,  is;  and  nothing  contradicts  any- 
thing. 

It  is  true  that  Harold  asks  questions.  But 
I  believe  he  asks  questions  not  because  he 
wonders,  but  because  he  suspects  that  he  is 
being  deprived  of  something  that  should  be 
his.  It  is  that  partly  and  partly  it  is  the 
desire  to  make  conversation.  He  insists  on 
having  his  privacy  respected,  but  often  he 
appears  to  be  seized  with  an  utter  sense  of 
loneliness.  All  children  experience  this  re- 
current necessity  of  clinging  to  some  one,  and 
they  do  so  by  putting  questions  the  answers 
to  which  frequently  do  not  interest  them  or 
else  are  already  known  to  them.  To  post- 
pone the  bed-time  hour  a  child  will  try  to 
make  conversation  as  desperately  as  any 
fashionable  hostess  with  an  uncle  from  the 
country  in  her  drawing-room.  Children 
rarely  deceive  themselves,  but  they  are  expert 
at  the  game  of  hoodwinking  and  conceal- 


132  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ment.  I  think  we  find  it  difficult  to  under- 
stand how  passionately  they  desire  to  be  let 
alone  whenever  they  do  not  need  us. 

And  how  desperately  bent  we  are  upon  not 
letting  them  alone!  The  number  of  ways  in 
which  I  am  constantly  being  urged  to'  make 
myself  a  nuisance  to  Harold  is  extraordinary. 
I  am  assailed  by  advertising  folders,  uplift 
articles  in  the  magazines,  Sunday  specials, 
Chautauqua  lectures,  pedagogical  reviews, 
and  the  voice  of  conscience  in  my  own  breast, 
to  inflict  myself  upon  the  boy,  to  win  his  con- 
fidence, make  him  my  comrade,  guide  his 
thoughts,  shape  his  moral  development,  keep 
a  diary  of  his  pregnant  utterances,  and  in 
every  other  way  that  may  occur  to  a  fertile 
mind  bent  on  mischief,  peer  into  him,  pry  into 
him,  spy  on  him,  spring  little  psychological 
traps  under  him  —  a  disgusting  process  of 
infant  vivisection  which  has  no  other  excuse 
than  our  own  vacant  curiosity.  Provided 
Harold  digests  his  food,  sleeps  well,  does  his 
lessons,  and  abstains  from  unclean  speech,  it 
is  no  business  of  mine  what  Harold  is  doing 


HAROLD'S   SOUL  133 

with  his  soul.  I  am  thankful  for  what  he 
consents  to  reveal  at  odd  moments.  I  guess 
at  what  I  can  guess  and  am  content  to  wait. 

And  waiting,  I  have  my  reward  —  occa- 
sionally. Not  until  several  weeks  after  I  had 
discovered  that  Harold  had  the  entree  into 
ecclesiastical  circles  did  the  subject  come  up 
again.  The  boy  paused  between  two  spoon- 
fuls of  cereal  and  asked  me  whether  a  bishop 
would  not  find  it  easier  to  go  up  a  mountain 
in  an  aeroplane.  I  foolishly  asked  him  what 
he  was  driving  at  and  he  grew  shy.  I  am 
afraid  he  now  thinks  bishops  are  not  proper. 

But  who  shall  say  that  the  connection  be- 
tween high  altitudes  and  the  episcopal  dig- 
nity is  not  really  an  important  one?  Harold 
is  apparently  occupied  with  the  question  and 
I  shall  take  care  not  to  disturb  him. 


XVI 

RHETORIC  21 

EVERY  time  I  happen  to  turn  to  the  Gettys- 
burg Address  I  am  saddened  to  find  that, 
after  many  years  of  practice,  my  own  liter- 
ary style  is  still  strikingly  inferior  to  that  of 
Lincoln  at  his  best.  The  fact  was  first 
brought  home  to  me  during  my  sophomore 
year. 

(Incidentally  I  would  remark  that  the  op- 
portunities for  consulting  the  Gettysburg 
Address  occur  frequently  in  a  newspaper  of- 
fice. Every  little  while,  in  the  lull  between 
editions,  a  difference  of  opinion  will  arise  as 
to  what  Lincoln  said  at  Gettysburg.  Some 
maintain  that  he  said,  "  a  government  of  the 
people,  for  the  people,  by  the  people  " ;  some 
declare  he  said,  "  a  government  by  the  peo- 
ple, of  the  people,  for  the  people  " ;  some  as- 
sert that  he  said,  "  a  government  by  the  peo- 
ple, for  the  people,  of  the  people."  Obvi- 
134 


RHETORIC   21  135 

ously  the  only  way  out  is  to  make  a  pool  and 
look  up  Nicolay  and  Hay.  When  we  are  not 
betting  on  Lincoln's  famous  phrase,  we  differ 
as  to  whether  the  first  words  in  Caesar  are 
"  Gallia  omnis  est  divisa,"  or  "  Omnis  Gallia 
est  divisa,"  or  "  Ctmnis  Gallia  divisa  est." 
We  all  remember  the  "  partes  tres.")  I 

In  my  sophomore  year  we  used  to  write 
daily  themes.  We  were  then  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  revolt  from  the  stilted  essay  to  the 
realistic  form  of  undergraduate  style.  In- 
stead of  writing  about  what  we  had  read  in 
De  Quincey  or  Matthew  Arnold,  we  were 
asked  to  write  about  what  we  had'  seen  on 
the  Elevated  or  on  the  campus/  I  presume 
this  literary  method  has  triumphed  in  all  the 
colleges,  just  as  I  know  that  the  new  school 
of  college  oratory  has  quite  displaced  the  old. 
Instead  of  arguing  whether  Greece  had  done 
more  for  civilisation  than  Rome,  sophomores 
now  debate  the  question,  "  Resolved,  that  the 
issue  of  4"!/2  per  cent,  convertible  State  bonds 
is  unjustified  by  prevailing  conditions  in  the 
European  money  market."  So  with  our 


136  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

daily  themes!  We  did  not  write  about  patri- 
otism or  Shakespeare's  use  of  contrast.  We 
wrote  about  football,  about  the  management 
of  the  lunch-room,  about  the  need  of  more 
call-boys  in  the  library. 

The  underlying  idea  was  sensible  enough. 
But  it  was  disheartening  to  have  a  daily 
theme  come  back  drenched  in  red  ink  to  show 
where  one's  prose  rhythm  had  broken  down 
or  the  relative  pronouns  had  run  too  thick. 
Our  instructors  were  good  men.  They  did 
not  content  themselves  with  pointing  out  our 
sins  against  style;  they  would  show  us  how 
much  more  skilfully  the  English  language 
could  be  used.  When  I  wrote :  "  That  the 
new  improvements  that  have  been  made  in 
the  new  gymnasium  that  has  just  been  inau- 
gurated are  all  that  are  necessary,"  my  in- 
structor would  pick  up  the  Gettysburg  Ad- 
dress and  read  out  aloud :  "  But  in  a  larger 
sense,  we  cannot  dedicate,  we  cannot  conse- 
crate, we  cannot  hallow  this  ground."  Some- 
times he  would  pick  up  the  Bible  and  readout 
aloud : 


RHETORIC  21  137 

For  now  should  I  have  lain  still  and  been 
quiet,  I  should  have  slept:  then  had  I  been  at 
rest, 

With  kings  and  counsellors  of  the  earth,  which 
built  desolate  places  for  themselves. 

Sometimes  he  would  read  from  Keats's  "  Gre- 
cian Urn,"  or  ask  me,  by  implication,  why  I 
could  not  frame  a  concrete  image  like 
"  Look'd  at  each  other  with  a  wild  surmise, 
Silent  upon  a  peak  in  Darien." 

Even  then  I  laboured  under  a  sense  of  in- 
justice. I  could  not  help  thinking  that  the 
comparison  would  have  been  more  fair  if  I 
had  had  a  chance  to  speak  at  Gettysburg  and 
Abraham  Lincoln  had  had  to  write  about  the 
new  gymnasium.  I  thought  how  the  red  ink 
would  have  splashed  if  I  hnd  ondod  a  ocntence 

™-  had  said  "  kings 


and  counsellors  which."  j  Are  there  still 
sophomores  whom  they  drill  in  writing  about 
the  prospects  of  the  hockey  team  and  to 
whom  they  read  "  The  Fall  of  the  House  of 
Usher,"  as  an  example  of  what  can  be  done 
with  the  English  language?/  And  do  some 


138  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

of  them  do  what  some  of  us,  in  desperation, 
used  to  do?  We  cheated.  We  worked  our- 
selves up  into  ecstasies  of  false  emotion  over 
the  hockey  team  or  pretended  to  see  things 
in  Central  Park  which  we  never  saw.  I  al- 
ways think  of  Central  Park  with  bitterness. 
We  were  to  write  a  description  of  what  we 
saw  as  we  stood  on  the  Belvedere  looking 
north.  I  wrote  a  faithful  catalogue  of  what 
I  saw,  and  the  instructor  picked  up  "  Les 
Miserables  "  and  read  me  the  story  of  the 
last  charge  over  the  sunken  road  at  Water- 
loo. I  should  have  done  what  one  of  the 
other  men  did.  He  never  went  to  Central 
Park.  He  stayed  at  home  and,  looking 
straight  north  from  the  Belvedere,  he  saw  the 
sun  setting  in  the  west,  and  Mr.  Carnegie's 
new  mansion  to  the  east,  and  the  towers  of 
St.  Patrick  directly  behind  him.  He  saw  it 
all  so  vividly,  so  harmoniously,  that  they 
marked  him  A.  I  got  C-j-.  Is  it  any  won- 
der that  I  cannot  even  now  read  the  Gettys- 
burg Address  without  a  twinge  of  resent- 
ment ?  % 


RHETORIC   21  139 

And  yet  we  were  fortunate  in  one  way. 
In  those  days  they  read  the  Gettysburg  Ad- 
dress to  us  as  a  model,  and  in  spite  of  our 
resentment  our  sophomore  hearts  caught  the 
glory  and  the  awe  of  it.  But  in  those  days 
the  art  of  text-book  writing  had  not  attained 
its  present  perfection,  and  the  Gettysburg 
Address  had  not  yet  been  edited  as  a  classic 
with  twenty  pages  of  introduction  and  I  don't 
know  how  many  foot-notes.  Am  I  wrong  in 
supposing  that  somewhere  in  the  high  schools 
or  the  colleges  this  is  what  the  young  soul 
finds  in  the  Gettysburg  Address  ? : 

Fourscore  and  seven  years  *  ago  our  fathers  2 
brought  forth  on  this  continent  3  a  new  nation,4 
conceived  in  liberty,  and  dedicated  to  the  proposi- 
tion 5  that  all  men  are  created  equal.6  Now  we 
are  engaged  in  a  great  civil  war,7  testing 
whether  that  nation,8  or  any  nation  so  conceived 
and  so  dedicated,9  can  long  endure.  We  are  met 
on  a  great  battlefield  10  of  that  war. 

NOTES* 

1  I.e.,     eighty-seven     years     ago.     The     Gettysburg 
Address  was  delivered  Nov.  19,  1863.     Lincoln  is  here 
referring  to  the  Declaration  of  Independence. 

2  Figuratively  speaking.     To  take   "  fathers "  in   a 


140  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

literal  sense  would,  of  course,  involve  a  physiological 
absurdity. 

3  The  western  continent,  embracing  North  and 
South  America. 

4 "  A  new  nation."  This  is  tautological,  since  a 
nation  just  brought  forth  would  necessarily  be  new, 

6  "  Proposition,"  in  the  sense  in  which  Euclid  em- 
ploys the  term  and  not  as  one  might  say  now,  "  a 
cloak  and  suit  proposition." 

e  See  the  Declaration  of  Independence  in  Albert 
Bushnell  Hart's  "  American  History  Told  by  Con- 
temporaries" (4  vols.,  Boston,  1898-1901). 

7  The  war  between  the  States,  1861-65. 
s  I.e.,  the  United  States. 

8  See  Elliot's  Debates  in  the  several  State  Conven- 
tions on  the  adoption  of  the  Federal  Constitution,  etc. 
(5  vols.,  Washington,  1840-15). 

10  Gettysburg;  a  borough  and  the  county  seat  of 
Adams  Co.,  Pennsylvania,  near  the  Maryland  border, 
35  miles  southwest  of  Harrisburg.  Pop.  in  1910, 
4,030. 


XVII 

REAL  PEOPLE 

AMONG  the  most  remarkable  people  I  have 
never  met  is  the  family  that  had  just  moved 
out  of  the  apartment  we  were  going  to  rent. 
My  knowledge  of  those  strangers  is  based  en- 
tirely on  odd  bits  of  information  casually  fur- 
nished by  the  renting-agent  in  the  course  of 
a  single  interview.  Yet  they  are  more  actual 
and  alive  to  me  than  many  people  with  whom 
I  have  lived  in  intimate  communion  for  years. 
Is  it  our  fate  ever  to  meet?  I  look  forward 
to  the  event  and  dread  it.  I  look  forward 
with  eagerness  to  a  new  sensation,  and  I  fear 
lest  the  reality  fall  short  of  the  vivid  image  I 
have  built  up  with  the  help  of  the  renting- 
agent. 

In  the  matter  of  picking  out  an  apartment, 
it  is  an  invariable  rule  that  I  shall  inspect  the 
place  and  decide  whether  I  like  it.  This  I  do 

after  Emmeline  has  paid  down  a  month's  rent 
141 


142  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

and  selected  the  wall-paper.  On  questions  of 
such  nature,  Emmeline  is  the  Balkan  States 
and  I  am  the  European  Concert.  She  cre- 
ates a  statuus  quo  and  I  ratify.  In  the  pres- 
ent instance,  however,  I  was  really  given  a 
free  hand.  Emmeline  admitted  she  was  suf- 
fering from  headache  when  she  told  the  rent- 
ing-agent  that  she  rather  liked  the  place. 
Later  she  recognised  that  the  rooms  were 
altogether  too  small.  What  had  swayed  her 
judgment  was  that  the  bedrooms  had  the  sun 
in  the  morning  and  we  should  thus  be  saving 
on  our  doctor's  bills.  In  this  respect  expen- 
sive apartments  are  like  high-powered  motor 
cars  and  a  long  summer  vacation  on  the  St. 
Lawrence.  They  may  be  all  easily  paid  for 
by  cutting  in  two  the  doctor's  annual  bills 
amounting  to  ninety-odd  dollars.  However, 
I  understood  that  this  time  Emmeline  would 
be  glad  to  be  overruled. 

The  European  Concert  had  its  first  shock 
when  it  was  confronted  with  the  size  of  the 
nursery  bedroom.  The  renting-agent  called 
my  attention  to  the  wall-paper.  It  had  a 


REAL  PEOPLE  143 

very  pretty  border,  showing  scenes  from 
"  Mother  Goose  " ;  this  at  once  revealed  the 
purpose  for  which  the  room  was  intended. 
But  I  pointed  out  to  him  that  if  we  put  a 
chest  of  drawers  against  the  wall  and  a  lit- 
tle armchair  in  the  corner,  the  crib  would 
come  hard  against  the  steam  pipe  and  would 
project  halfway  across  the  window. 

"  Oh,"  he  said,  looking  up  in  surprise. 
"There's  a  crib?" 

"  Naturally,"  I  said,  "  we  should  want  this 
nursery  for  the  baby." 

This  did  not  seem  to  strike  him  as  alto- 
gether unreasonable,  but  he  was  puzzled  nev- 
ertheless. 

"  You  see,"  he  explained,  "  the  people  who 
were  here  before  you  had  a  music-box." 

When  a  renting-agent  discerns  signs  of  dis- 
appointment in  a  prospective  tenant  he  imme- 
diately calls  his  attention  to  the  shower.  The 
agent's  face  as  he  ushered  me  into  the  bath- 
room and  pointed  to  the  shower  was  irradi- 
ated by  a  smile  of  ecstatic  beatitude.  He  re- 
minded me  of  Mme.  Nazimova  when  she  waits 


144  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

for  the  Master  Builder  to  tumble  from  the 
church  tower. 

"  Does  the  shower  work  ?  "  I  asked. 

*'  Why,  of  course  it  does,"  he  said. 

"  That  is  very  interesting,"  I  said.  "  Most 
of  them  either  drip  or  else  the  hot  water  comes 
down  all  at  once.  I  don't  suppose  you  have 
to  keep  away  to  one  side  and  thrust  your  fin- 
ger forward  timidly  before  you  venture  under 
the  shower?  " 

"  Not  at  all,"  he  said.  "  This  has  splendid 
pressure.  Just  turn  it  on  for  yourself." 

I  did  as  I  was  told,  and  after  he  had  finished 
drying  himself  with  his  handkerchief  he  asked 
me  whether  this  wasn't  one  of  the  best  showers 
I  had  ever  come  across.  I  agreed,  and  he 
then  told  me  that  the  very  latest  ideas  in  mod- 
ern bath-room  construction  had  been  utilised 
by  the  architect.  As  for  the  people  who  had 
just  moved  out,  they  were  so  delighted  with 
the  shower  that  they  spent  the  greater  part  of 
the  day  in  the  tub,  often  doing  their  reading 
there. 

On  our  way  towards  the  library  and  living- 


REAL  PEOPLE  '14,5 

room  he  called  my  attention  to  the  air  in  the 
hall.  He  said  that  if  there  was  any  breeze 
stirring  anywhere  we  were  sure  to  get  it  in 
that  particular  apartment.  This  puzzled  me, 
because  he  had  told  Emmeline  the  same  thing 
about  another  apartment  which  she  had  in- 
spected and  which  faces  south  and  west,  while 
this  one  faces  north  and  east.  Suppose  now 
a  good  northeast  breeze  —  But  we  were  now 
in  the  main  bedroom  and  he  was  asking  me  to 
take  notice  of  a  small  iron  safe  let  into  the 
wall  at  the  height  of  one's  head. 

"  This,"  he  said,  "  is  extremely  useful  for 
jewels  and  old  silver.  You  don't  find  it  in 
every  apartment  house,  I  assure  you." 

"  That  is  convenient,"  I  said,  and  looked 
out  of  the  window,  "  and  of  course  one  could 
keep  other  valuables  in  there,  too,  like  bonds 
and  mortgages  and  such  things." 

"  A  great  many  people  do,"  he  said. 

We  passed  another  bedroom  which  was  so 
small  that  even  the  agent  looked  apologetic. 
He  said  it  was  the  maid's  room,  but  that  the 
people  who  had  just  moved  out  had  a  woman 


146  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

come  in  by  the  day  and  used  the  chamber  as  a 
store-room.  He  supposed  we  should  prefer 
to  have  our  maid  sleep  in  the  house. 

"  We  do,"  I  said,  "  but  then  we  might  get  a 
short  maid.  The  Finns,  for  example,  are  a 
notoriously  chunky  race  and  attain  their  full 
height  at  an  early  age.  Let  us  look  at  the 
library." 

I  did  not  like  the  room  at  all.  It  faced 
north  and  looked  out  upon  the  rear  of  a  tall 
building  only  thirty  feet  away.  I  asked  him 
if  the  light  was  always  as  bleak  as  it  was  to- 
day. 

"  You  get  all  the  light  you  want  in 
here,"  he  said.  "  Lots  of  people,  you  know, 
object  to  the  sun.  It's  hard  on  the  eyes. 
The  people  who  had  this  apartment  always 
kept  the  window  shades  down.  It  made  the 
room  so  cosy." 

I  shook  my  head.  The  dimensions  of  the 
room  were  quite  disappointing.  It  was  not 
only  small,  but  there  was  little  wall  space, 
because  the  architect  had  provided  no  less 
than  three  doorways  which  were  supposed  to 


REAL  PEOPLE  147 

be  covered  with  portieres.  I  presume  that 
architects  find  open  doorways  much  easier  to 
plan  than  any  other  part  of  a  room. 

He  was  surprised  at  my  objections. 
There  was  plenty  of  space,  he  thought.  As 
libraries  go  it  was  one  of  the  largest  he  had 
seen.  Here  you  put  an  armchair,  and  here 
you  put  a  small,  compact  writing-desk,  and 
you  had  plenty  of  floor  space  in  the  middle 
for  a  small  table. 

"  And  the  bookcases  ?  "  I  asked. 

He  looked  downcast. 

"  You  have  bookcases  ?  "  he  said. 

"  We  have  six." 

He  was  about  to  say  something,  but  I  an- 
ticipated him. 

"  I  know,  of  course,"  I  said,  "  that  the 
people  who  lived  here  before  used  to  keep 
their  books  in  the  kitchen,  but  I  hardly  see 
how  we  could  manage  that.  It's  too  much 
trouble,  and  besides  I  am  somewhat  absent- 
minded.  It  would  be  absurd  if  I  should  walk 
into  the  kitchen  for  a  copy  of  *  Man  and 
Superman,'  and  come  back  with  half  a  grape- 


148  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

fruit  on  a  plate.  And,  furthermore,  I  like 
a  library  where  a  man  can  get  up  occasion- 
ally from  his  writing-table  and  pace  up  and 
down  while  he  is  clarifying  his  ideas.  You 
couldn't  do  that  here." 

"  There  is  a  nice,  long  hall,"  he  said. 
"  You  might  pace  up  and  down  that."  But 
he  saw  I  was  unconvinced,  and  he  djd  not  go 
to  much  pains  in  exhibiting  the  dining-room, 
merely  remarking  that  it  did  look  rather 
small,  but  the  people  who  last  lived  in  the 
apartment  were  accustomed  to  go  out  for 
their  meals. 

You  will  see  now  why  I  am  so  intensely 
interested  in  the  tenants  whose  successors  we 
were  on  the  point  of  being.  With  life  grow- 
ing more  flat  and  monotonous  about  us,  how 
refreshing  to  come  across  a  family  which 
keeps  a  music-box  in  the  nursery,  does  its 
reading  in  the  bath-tub,  and  never  eats  in  the 
dining-room.  Is  it  studied  originality  on 
their  part  or  are  they  born  rebels?  And 
how  far  does  their  eccentricity  go?  Does  the 
head  of  the  house,  when  setting  out  for  his 


REAL  PEOPLE  149 

office  In  the  morning,  walk  upstairs?  Do 
they  walk  downstairs  when  they  wish  to  go  to 
bed? 

I  am  still  to  meet  these  highly  original 
citizens  of  New  York,  but  their  numbers  must 
be  increasing.  Every  year  I  hear  of  more 
and  more  former  tenants  who  prefer  dark 
rooms  and  libraries  without  shelf  space.  I 
have  never  asked  the  renting-agent  why,  being 
so  contented  with  their  surroundings,  his  ten- 
ants should  have  moved  out.  But  probably 
it  is  because  they  have  found  an  apartment 
where  the  rooms  are  still  smaller  and  the  win- 
dows have  no  sun  at  all. 


XVIII 

DIFFERENT 

CONSTANTLY  I  am  being  invited,  through  the 
mails  or  the  advertising  columns,  to  buy 
something  because  it  is  different.  Such  ap- 
peals are  wasted  upon  me.  In  the  realm  of 
ideas,  I  am  as  radical  as  the  best  of  them,  in 
many  ways.  But  when  it  comes  to  shopping 
I  am  afraid  of  change. 

The  advertising  writer  is  the  most  unorig- 
inal creature  imaginable.  He  is  more  imita- 
tive than  a  theatre  manager  on  Broadway. 
He  is  more  imitative  than  the  revolutionaries 
of  art,  the  Impressionist  who  imitates  the 
Romanticist,  the  Post-Impressionist  who  imi- 
tates the  Impressionist,  the  Cubist  who  imi- 
tates the  Post-Impressionist,  the  Futurist 
who  imitates  the  Cubist,  and  the  Parisian 
dressmaker  who  imitates  the  Futurist.  When 
a  happy  word  or  phrase  or  symbol  is  let  loose 

in  the  advertising  world,  it  is  caught  up,  and 
150 


DIFFERENT  151 

repeated,  and  chanted,  and  echoed,  until  the 
sound  and  sight  of  it  become  a  torture.  How 
long  ago  is  it  since  every  merchantable  prod- 
uct of  man's  ingenuity  from  automobiles  to 
xylophones  was  being  dedicated  to  "  his 
majesty  the  American  citizen"?  How  long 
is  it  since  every  item  in  the  magazine  pages 
was  something  ending  in  ly,  "  supremely " 
good,  or  "  potently  "  attractive,  or  "  perma- 
nently "  satisfying,  or  in  any  other  conceiv- 
able phrase,  adverbially  so?  To-day  the 
mail-order  lists  are  crammed  with  commodi- 
ties that  are  different.  Oh,  jaded  American 
appetite  that  refuses  to  accept  a  two-for-a- 
quarter  Troy  collar  unless  it  is  different ! 

Now  the  truth  that  must  be  apparent  to 
any  man  who  will  only  think  for  a  moment  — 
and  by  all  accounts  your  advertising  writer  is 
always  engaged  in  a  hellish  fury  of  cerebra- 
tion —  is  that  there  are  a  great  many  com- 
modities whose  value  depends  on  the  very 
fact  that  they  shall  not  be  different,  but  the 
same.  If  I  were  engaged  in  the  business  of 
publicity,  I  cannot  imagine  myself  writing, 


152  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

"  Try  our  eggs  —  they  are  different."  I 
should  also  hesitate  to  write,  "  Sample  our 
lifeboats,  they  are  different;  try  them  and 
you  will  use  no  other."  If  I  were  working 
for  the  gas  company  I  should  never  think  of 
saying,  "  Come  in  and  look  at  our  gas  metres, 
they  are  different."  It  requires  little  effort 
to  draw  up  a  list  of  marketable  goods,  serv- 
ices, and  utilities  for  which  it  would  be  no 
recommendation  at  all  to  say  that  they  are 
different.  Thus : 

Railway  time  tables.   ) 

Photographs. 

Grocers'  scales. 

Complexions. 

Affidavits,  and  especially  statements  made 
in  swearing  off  personal  property  tax  assess- 
ments. 

Clocks. 

Individual  shoes  of  a  pair. 

The  multiplication  table. 

The  Yosemite  Valley. 

In  every  instance  it  would  manifestly  be 
absurd  to  try  to  prove  that  the  object  in 


DIFFERENT  153 

question  is  anything  but  what  we  have  always 
known  it  to  be  or  expected  it  to  be. 

On  the  other  hand,  there  is  a  great  class  of 
commodities  which  one  would  never  think  of 
taking  seriously  unless  we  were  assured  that 
they  are  different  from  what  we  have  always 
found  them  to  be.  If  some  ingenious  in- 
ventor could  really  put  on  the  market  a  Tam- 
many Hall  that  was  different,  or  a  hair  tonic 
that  was  different,  or  something  different  in 
the  way  of 

Hat  plumes  (guaranteed  not  to  tickle). 

Musical  comedy. 

Rag-time. 

Domestic  help. 

Book-reviews. 

Winter  temperature  at  Palm  Beach  (as 
compared  with  temperature  in  New  York 
city). 

Remarks  on  the  weather. 

Mr.  Carnegie's  speeches. 

Remarks  on  Maude  Adams. 

Epigrams  about  women. 

Epigrams  about  love. 


154  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

Epigrams  about  money. 

Epigrams. 

Food  prices. 

Florence  Barclay. 

Golf  drivers  (guaranteed  not  to  slice). 

Brassies  (guaranteed  not  to  top). 

Mid-irons  (guaranteed  not  to  cut). 

Advertising. 

And  countless  other  things  which  every  one 
can  imagine  being  different  in  a  better-organ- 
ised world  than  ours. 

But  does  your  advertising  expert  recog- 
nise the  distinction  between  things  which  must 
under  no  consideration  be  different  and 
things  which  must  be  made  different  if  they 
are  to  find  acceptance?  Not  in  the  least. 
In  season  and  out  he  sounds  his  poor  little 
catch-word,  and  frightens  away  as  many  cus- 
tomers as  he  attracts.  Under  such  circum- 
stances one  can  only  wonder  why  advertising 
should  continue  to  be  the  best-paid  bra'nch  of 
American  literature.  Of  what  use  are  the 
Science  of  Advertising,  the  Psychology  of  Ad- 
vertising, the  Dynamics  of  Advertising,  the 


DIFFERENT  155 

Ethics  of  Advertising,  the  Phonetics  of  Ad- 
vertising, the  Strategy  and  Tactics  and 
Small-Fire  Manuals  of  Advertising  —  on  all 
of  which  subjects  I  have  perused  countless 
volumes  —  if  all  this  theoretical  study  will 
not  teach  a  man  that  it  is  appropriate  to  say : 
"  Try  our  latest  Hall  Caine,  it  is  different," 
and  quite  out  of  place  to  say,  "  Try  our 
quart  measures,  they  are  different  "  ? 

Between  the  things  that  must  never  be  dif- 
ferent and  the  things  that  ought  never  to  be 
the  same,  there  is  a  vast  class  of  commodities 
which  may  be  the  same  or  may  be  different 
according  to  choice.  Linen  collars,  musical 
machines,  newspapers,  ignition  systems,  in- 
terior decoration  —  it  is  evident  that  some 
people  may  like  them  the  same  and  some  peo- 
ple may  like  them  different.  My  own  incli- 
nations, as  I  have  intimated,  are  toward  the 
same,  but  my  sympathies  are  with  those  who 
want  things  different.  The  argument  ad- 
vanced by  the  advertiser  in  behalf  of  his  lat- 
est three-button,  long-hipped,  university  sack 
with  rolling  collar,  that  it  is  different  and 


156  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

that  it  radiates  my  individuality,  leaves  me 
cold.  I  am  not  moved  by  the  plea  that  the 
rolling-collar  effect  is  so  different  that  a 
quarter-million  suits  of  that  model  have  al- 
ready been  sold  west  of  the  Alleghanies.  I 
remain  indifferent  on  being  told  that  the 
three-button  effect  would  radiate  my  individ- 
uality even  as  it  is  radiating  the  individuality 
of  ten  thousand  citizens  of  Spokane.  When 
it  is  a  choice  between  wearing  unindividual 
clothes  of  my  own  or  being  different  with  a 
hundred  thousand  others,  I  suppose  I  must 
be  classed  as  a  reactionary  and  a  fossil. 


XIX 

ACADEMIC  FREEDOM 

THE  approaching  end  of  another  college  year 
gives  peculiar  timeliness  to  the  following  ac- 
count of  a  recent  meeting  of  the  Supercol- 
legiate  Committee  on  Entrance  Examina- 
tions. For  the  details  of  the  story  I  am 
indebted  to  the  able  and  conscientious  corre- 
spondent of  the  Disassociated  Press  at  Noth- 
ingham.  The  discerning  reader  will  have  no 
difficulty  in  identifying  the  persons  men- 
tioned. Professor  Miinsterberg  is,  of  course, 
Professor  Miinsterberg.  Professor  Louns- 
bury  is  Professor  Lounsbury.  Professor 
Hart  is  Professor  Albert  Bushnell  Hart. 
Dr.  Woods  Hutchinson  is  Dr.  Woods  Hutch- 
inson. 

Professor  Miinsterberg:  The  meeting  will 
please  come  to  order.  We  are  now  in  the 
first  week  of  October.  This  fact,  which  the 

average  citizen  has  probably  accepted  with- 
157 


158  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

out  question,  has  been  amply  confirmed  in  an 
elaborate  series  of  laboratory  tests  carried 
on  by  means  of  white  and  yellow  cards  and 
rapidly  revolving  disks.  Thus  we  are  pre- 
pared to  discuss  once  more  the  highly  inter- 
esting question,  why  the  vast  majority  of 
freshmen  cannot  spell.  Neither  can  they 
write  their  native  tongue  in  accordance  with 
the  rules  of  grammar. 

Professor  Lounsbury:  Aw,  gee!  Why 
should  they?  Look  at  Chaucer,  Milton,  and 
Browning.  The  fiercest  bunch  of  little  spell- 
ers you  ever  saw.  And  their  grammar  is  sim- 
ply rotten.  They  didn't  care  a  red  cent  for 
the  grammarians.  When  they  saw  a  word  or 
a  phrase  they  liked  they  went  to  it.  If  the 
grammarians  didn't  agree  with  them  it  was 
up  to  the  grammarians.  Chaucer  should 
worry. 

Dr.  Hutchinson:  Quite  right. 

Professor  Lounsbury :  The  question  is  this : 
Are  freshmen  made  for  the  English  language 
or  is  language  made  for  freshmen?  Lan- 
guage is  like  a  human  being;  change  does  it 


ACADEMIC  FREEDOM          159 

good.  Stick  to  your  Lindley  Murray  and 
it's  a  cinch  yc^ur  little  old  English  tongue  will 
be  a  dead  one  in  fifty  years. 

Dr.  Hutchihson:  I  agree  with  Professor 
Lounsbury,  speaking  from  the  standpoint  of 
physiology.  Constant  use  of  a  plural  verb 
with  a  plural  subject  plays  the  deuce  with  the 
larynx.  You  know  what  the  larynx  is,  gen- 
tlemen. It's  the  rubber  disk  in  the  human 
Victrola.  Crop  the  pin  on  the  rubber  disk 
and  the  record  will  grind  out  the  same  for- 
mula, again  and  again.  Keep  it  up  long 
enough  and  the  record  wears  out.  That's 
the  larynx  under  the  operation  of  grammat- 
ical rules.  It  gets  the  habit,  and  the  first 
law  of  health  is  to  avoid  all  habits.  What 
you  want  to  do  is  to  shake  up  the  larynx  by 
feeding  it  with  new  forms  of  expression. 
When  a  man  says  "  I  done  it,"  it  imparts  a 
healthy  jolt  to  the  delicate  muscles  of  the 
throat,  limbers  up  his  aorta  and  his  dia- 
phragm, and  reconciles  him  with  his  diges- 
tion. This  is  the  opinion  of  eminent  physi- 
ologists, like  Drmckheimer  of  Leipzig. 


160  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

Professor  Lounsbury:  Whom  did  you  say 
the  man  is? 

Dr.  Hutchinson:  Drinckheimer,  professor 
at  Leipzig.  He  doesn't  write  for  the  maga- 
zines. 

Professor  Lounsbury :  Then  you  agree  with 
me  that  when  a  man  has  something  to  say  he 
will  say  it? 

Professor  Miinsterberg:  We  have  an  ex- 
cellent illustration  on  this  point  in  a  history 
paper  submitted  in  the  last  entrance  exam- 
inations. In  reply  to  the  question,  "  Name 
the  first  two  Presidents  of  the  United  States," 
one  candidate  wrote,  "  The  first  pressident 
was  Gorge  Washington;  his  predeceassor 
was  Alexander  Hamilton."  Observe  the  ex- 
traordinary psychological  correlation  be- 
tween thought  and  expression  in  such  a  reply. 

Professor  Hart:  I  don't  think  the  young 
man  was  guilty  of  an  injustice  with  regard 
to  Alexander  Hamilton.  You  will  recall  that 
Hamilton  was  one  of  the  principal  founders 
of  the  system  of  privilege  which  has  pro- 
duced, in  our  own  day,  Lorimerism  and  the 


ACADEMIC  FREEDOM          161 

purchase  of  Southern  delegates.  If  it  had 
not  been  for  Hamilton  and  his  crowd  we 
should  not  now  be  compelled  to  wage  a  cam- 
paign for  social  justice  and  I  should  not  be 
under  the  necessity  of  writing  Bull  Moose 
history  for  Collier's. 

Dr.  Hutchinson:  But  getting  back  to  the 
real  point  of  our  inquiry,  whether  the  failure 
to  spell  and  write  correctly  is  a  sign  of  mental 
feebleness  — 

Professor  Miinsterberg :  On  that  point  I 
believe  I  can  speak  with  authority.  Psycho- 
logical tests  in  the  laboratory  show  that  the 
average  freshman  is  as  quick-witted  to-day 
as  his  predecessor  of  fifty  or  a  hundred  years 
ago.  We  examined  three  hundred  first-year 
men  from  eleven  colleges  and  universities. 
Each  man  was  required  to  peep  into  a  dark 
box,  shaped  like  a  camera,  through  an  eye- 
hole sixteen  millimetres  in  diameter.  By 
pressing  a  button,  light  was  flashed  upon  a 
slip  of  paper  inside  the  box,  on  which  was 
printed,  in  letters  nine  millimetres  high,  the 
following  question :  "  What  is  your  favour- 


162  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ite  breakfast  food  ?  "  The  candidate  was  re- 
quired to  signify  his  answer  by  tapping  with 
his  finger  on  the  table,  one  tap  for  Farinetta, 
two  taps  for  Dried  Husks,  three  taps  for  At- 
las Crumbs,  and  so  forth.  The  average  time 
for  three  hundred  answers  was  six  and  seven- 
tenths  seconds.  Thereupon  the  candidates 
were  asked  to  think  over  the  question  at  their 
leisure  and  to  hand  in  a  written  answer  sworn 
to  before  a  notary  public.  On  comparing 
the  written  answers  with  the  laboratory  re- 
sults, it  appeared  that  only  thirty-seven  out 
of  the  three  hundred  had  tapped  the  wrong 
answer.  Need  I  say  more? 

Professor  Lounsbury:  May  I  ask  how  the 
written  answers  showed  up  from  the  point  of 
view  of  spelling  and  grammar? 

Professor  Miinsterberg :  They  were  im- 
pressively defective. 

Professor  Lounsbury :  I'm  tickled  to  death. 
When  you  cut  out  bad  spelling  and  grammar, 
you  queer  the  evolution  of  the  English  lan- 
guage. There's  nothing  to  it. 

Professor  Miinsterberg:  But  take  the  case 


ACADEMIC  FREEDOM          163 

of  the  freshman  squad  whom  we  kept  in  a  her- 
metically sealed  room  for  twenty-four  hours 
at  a  temperature  of  eighty-nine  degrees  — 

Professor  Lounsbury:  May  I  ask  what 
their  language  was  when  they  were  released 
at  the  end  of  twenty-four  hours? 

Professor  Miinsterberg:  Truth  compels  me 
to  say  it  was  something  awful. 

Professor  Lounsbury:  But  how  about  the 
grammar  ? 

Professor  Miinsterberg:  There  was  no 
grammar  to  speak  of.  They  used'  mostly  in- 
terjections.. 

Dr.  Hutchinson :  Finest  thing  in  the  world, 
interjections.  Good  for  the  lungs  and  the 
heart.  Rapid  process  of  inhalation  and  ex- 
pulsion keeps  the  bellows  in  prime  order. 
That's  all  a  man  is,  gentlemen,  a  bellows  on  a 
pair  of  stilts  driven  by  a  hydraulic  pump. 
If  the  bellows  holds  out  under  sudfden  strain, 
that's  all  you  want.  That's  why  I  like  to 
hear  people  swear.  It's  good  for  the  wind. 
Next  time  you  walk  down  a  step  too  many  in 
the  dark  or  lose  your  hat  under  a  motor 


164  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

truck,  don't  hold  yourself  back.  It's  the 
way  nature  is  safeguarding  you  against 
asthma. 

Professor  Miinsterberg :  Then  it  is  the  con- 
sensus of  opinion  here  that  the  psychological 
and  cultural  status  of  our  college  freshmen  is 
everything  it  ought  to  be? 

Professor  Hart:  I'd  rather  take  the  opin- 
ion of  a  roomful  of  freshmen  on  any  subject 
than  the  opinion  of  the  United  States  Su- 
preme Court.  They  don't  know  anything 
about  American  history,  but  it's  the  kind  of 
history  that  isn't  worth  knowing.  I  prefer 
them  to  know  things  as  they  ought  to  have 
been  rather  than  as  they  were  before  the  Pro- 
gressive party  was  born.  Whatever  is  worth 
preserving  from  the  past,  including  the  Deca- 
logue, will  be  found  in  the  Bull  Moose  plat- 
form. We  don't  want  examination  papers. 
We  want  social  justice. 

Professor  Lounsbury :  Between  you  and  I, 
the  English  language  won't  get  what's  com- 
ing to  it  until  all  entrance  examinations  have 
been  chucked  into  the  discard. 


ACADEMIC  FREEDOM          165 

Dr.  Hutchinson:  Spelling  is  demonstrably 
bad  for  the  muscles  of  the  chest  and  the  ab- 
domen. 

Professor  Lounsbury:  You've  said  it. 


XX 

THE  HEAVENLY  MAID 

As  the  familiar  sound  fell  upon  our  ears,  we 
walked  to  the  window,  drew  aside  the  cur- 
tains, and  shamelessly  stared  into  the  windows 
of  the  apartment  across  the  court.  That 
usually  quiet  home  had  been  in  evident  agita- 
tion all  that  afternoon.  There  was  the  noise 
of  hurrying  feet.  Excited  voices  broke  out 
now  and  then.  Twice  a  woman  scolded  and 
we  distinctly  heard  a  child  cry.  Now  the 
mystery  was  explained. 

"  The  new  Orpheola  has  come,"  said  Em- 
meline.  "  I  wonder  how  late  they  will  keep 
it  up  the  first  night." 

In  the  apartment  across  the  way  the  fam- 
ily was  gathered  in  a  reverent  circle  about 
the  new  talking-machine,  and  we  heard  the 
opening  strains  of  the  "  Song  to  the  Evening 
Star." 

"  Have  you  ever  thought,"  I  said  to  Em- 
166 


THE   HEAVENLY  MAID         167 

meline,  "  how  infinitely  superior  the  music  of 
Wagner  is  to  that  of  any  other  composer,  in 
its  immunity  against  influenza?  The  Ger- 
man Empire,  you  know,  has  a  moist  climate, 
and  the  magician  of  Bayreuth  recognised 
that  he  must  write  primarily  for  a  nation 
that  is  extremely  subject  to  cold  in  the  head. 
It  was  different  with  the  Italian  composers. 
Bronchial  troubles  are  virtually  unknown  in 
Italy.  When  Verdi  wrote,  he  failed  to  make 
allowance  for  a  sudden  attack  of  the  grippe. 
That  is  why  when  Caruso  catches  cold  they 
must  change  the  bill  at  the  Metropolitan. 
But  if  a  Wagnerian  tenor  loses  his  voice,  the 
papers  say  the  next  morning,  '  Herr  Donner 
sang  Tristan  last  night  with  extraordinary 
intelligence.'  Sometimes  Herr  Donner  sings 
with  extraordinary  intelligence ;  sometimes  he 
sings  with  marvellous  histrionic  power ;  some- 
times he  sings  with  an  earnest  vigour  amount- 
ing to  frenzy.  Wagner,  who  foresaw  every- 
thing, foresaw  the  disastrous  effect  of  steam- 
heated  rooms  on  the  delicate  organs  of  the 
throat.  So  he  developed  a  music  form  in 


168  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

which  the  use  of  the  throat  is  not  always  es- 
sential." 

"  I  know,"  said  Emmeline,  "  that  you'd 
much  rather  listen  to  the  la-la,  la-la-la-la-la- 
lah  from  Traviata." 

"  I'd  much  rather  listen  to  Traviata,"  I 
said,  losing  my  temper,  "  than  strive  pain- 
fully to  be  electrified  by  the  *  Ho-yo-to-ho ' 
of  eight  Valkyrie  maidens  averaging  one  hun- 
dred and  seventy-five  pounds  and  leaping 
from  crag  to  crag  at  a  speed  of  two  miles 
an  hour." 

When  a  man  first  acquires  an  Orpheola, 
he  loses  interest  in  his  business.  He  leaves 
for  home  early  and  bolts  his  dinner.  The 
first  night  he  sits  down  before  the  machine 
from  6:30  to  11,  and  with  a  rapt  expression 
on  his  face  he  runs  off  every  record  in  his 
collection  twice.  No  one  but  himself  is  per- 
mitted to  return  the  precious  rubber  disk  to 
its  envelope.  Later  in  the  week  the  eldest 
child,  as  a  reward  of  good  behaviour,  may  be 
allowed  to  adjust  the  record  on  the  revolving 


THE   HEAVENLY  MAID         169 

base  and  to  pull  the  starting  lever,  while 
mother  watches  anxiously  from  the  dining- 
room.  At  intervals  grandma  puts  her  head 
in  at  the  door  to  make  sure  that  the  proper 
needle  has  been  inserted.  The  modern 
musical  cabinet  does  not  eliminate  the 
personal  factor.  People  can  put  all  of  their 
individuality  into  the  music  by  choosing  be- 
tween a  fine  needle  and  one  with  a  blunt  point. 
Persons  of  temperament  are  particular  about 
the  speed  at  which  the  disk  revolves.  When 
a  man  is  in  high  spirits  he  picks  out  a  sharp 
needle  and  winds  the  spring  up  tight.  Pes- 
simists do  just  the  opposite.  It  is  imperative 
to  keep  the  fine,  steel  points  out  of  the  baby's 
reach  because  irreparable  harm  might  thereby 
be  done  to  the  record. 

"  Of  course,"  said  Emmeline,  "  I  can  see 
why  you  should  be  so  greatly  attracted  by 
the  Italian  ting-a-ling  stuff.  It's  the  result 
of  your  journalistic  training.  It's  the  most 
superficial  business  there  is.  Everything  in 
a  newspaper  must  be  perfectly  obvious  at 


170  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

the  first  glance,  and  there's  nothing  like  a 
jingle  to  fetch  the  crowd.  After  a  while  a 
man  gets  to  be  like  the  people  he  writes  for," 

I  had  been  called  to  the  telephone  and  Em- 
meline  had  made  use  of  the  interval  to  build 
up  her  little  argument.  It  was  unfair,  but  I 
generously  refrained  from  saying  so.  Be- 
sides, I,  too,  had  not  been  idle  while  I  waited 
for  Central  to  restore  the  connection. 

"  I  am  not  denying,"  I  said,  "  that  Wag- 
ner gets  his  effects,  if  you  give  him  time 
enough.  But  how  does  he  do  it?  By  wear- 
ing you  out  and  knocking  you  down  and  run- 
ning away  with  you.  That  was  the  way,  you 
will  recall,  the  old  Teutonic  gods  and  heroes 
used  to  make  love.  When  a  Germanic  war- 
rior was  attacked  with  the  fatal  passion,  he 
would  seize  the  well-beloved  by  the  hair, 
throw  her  over  his  shoulder  and  ride  away 
with  her.  It  was  different  with  Puccini's 
countrymen.  In  their  hands  a  mandolin  on 
a  moonlit  night  under  a  balcony  melted  away 
all  opposition.  After  half  an  hour  of  solid 


THE  HEAVENLY  MAID        171 

Wagnerian  brasswork  you  surrender;  but 
only  the  way  Adrianople  surrendered. 

"  That,  too,  was  the  case  with  the  early 
Teutonic  ladies.  Their  masters  did  not  al- 
ways woo  with  a  club.  Now  and  then  they  in- 
terjected little  bits  of  kindness  which  were 
appreciated  because  they  were  so  rare.  That 
is  Wagner  again.  Every  little  while  he 
throws  you  a  kind  word,  a  snatch  of  golden 
melody  that  Verdi  himself  might  have  written, 
and,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  did  write  all  the 
time.  With  the  master  of  Bayreuth  these 
little  rifts  in  the  clouds  are  doubly  welcome. 
They  shine  out  like  a  good  deed  on  a  dark 
night." 

"  How  any  one  can  listen  to  the  last  act  of 
Tristan  without  feeling  all  the  sorrow  of  the 
universe,  I  cannot  understand,"  said  Em- 
meline.  "  Do  you  mean  to  say  that  the 
Liebestod  does  not  really  carry  you  out  of 
yourself?  " 

"  It  does  not,"  I  said.  "  But  when  Gad- 
ski  in  Ai'da  turns  to  the  wicked  Amneris  and 


172  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

sings  *  Tu  sei  felice,'  something  in  me  begins 
to  give  way." 

"  It  is  probably  your  intellect,"  said  Em- 
meline. 

One  popular  error  with  regard  to  talking- 
machines  is  that  they  have  solved  the 
hitherto  irreconcilable  conflict  between  music 
on  the  one  hand  and  bridge  and  conversation 
on  the  other.  At  first  sight  it  may  seem  that 
the  religious  silence  which  one  must  maintain 
while  some  one  is  singing  —  it  may  be  the 
hostess  herself  —  is  no  longer  compulsory. 
You  cannot  hurt  the  feelings  of  a  mahogany 
cabinet  three  feet  high.  If  the  worst 
happens,  you  can  wind  up  the  machine  and 
start  all  over  again.  But  actually  the  situa- 
tion is  very  much  what  it  was  before.  I  my- 
self, on  one  occasion  when  Tetrazzini  was 
singing  from  Lucia,  ventured  to  lean  over  to 
my  neighbour  and  whisper  a  word  or  two. 
Whereupon  there  came  across  the  face  of  my 
host,  brooding  fondly  over  the  machine,  a 
look  of  pain  such  as  I  never  want  to  bring  to 


THE   HEAVENLY  MAID         173 

any  face  again.  As  it  happened,  it  was  the 
man's  favourite  record.  On  the  other  hand, 
people  who  play  cards  tell  me  that  as  between 
a  living  tenor  and  Caruso  on  the  machine 
there  is  not  much  to  choose.  Both  are  a 
hindrance  to  the  correct  leading  of  trumps. 

"  Besides,"  I  said,  "  any  number  of  Wag- 
nerians  will  tell  you  that  tne  music  dramas 
in  their  unabridged  form  are  much  too  long. 
You  will  recall  that  Wagner  himself  said  that 
many  of  his  scores  would  benefit  by  generous 
cutting.  A  great  many  eminent  conductors 
have  made  a  specialty  of  cutting  things  out 
of  Tristan.  This  serves  a  double  purpose. 
It  permits  the  development  of  a  class  of  post- 
graduate Wagnerians  who  can  take  the  whole 
opera  without  flinching,  and  it  enables  peo- 
ple to  catch  the  11 :45  for  Montclair.  Some- 
where I  have  come  across  a  story  of  two  great 
conductors  who  had  charge  of  rival  orchestras 
in  one  of  the  principal  cities  of  Europe. 
One  man,  when  he  conducted  the  Ring,  was 
in  the  habit  of  cutting  out  the  first  half  of 


174  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

every  act.  The  other  man  played  the  first 
half,  but  omitted  the  second  half  of  every 
act.  For  many  years  there  was  a  bitter  con- 
troversy as  to  which  of  the  two  conductors 
best  brought  out  the  real  meaning  of  the 
composer." 

"  I  don't  think  it  is  a  very  good  story," 
said  Emmeline,  walking  to  the  window  and 
closing  it ;  for  our  neighbour's  machine  had 
switched  without  warning  from  the  Ride  of 
the  Valkyrs  to  Alexander's  Band.  "  It's  a 
poor  story  and  I  am  inclined  to  think  you 
made  it  up  yourself." 

"  As  for  that,"  I  said,  "  that  is  just  what 
Wagner  did  with  his  music." 

When  you  overhear  a  man  in  the  subway 
say  to  his  neighbour,  "  Mine  are  all  twelve- 
inch,  reversible,  and  go  equally  well  on  low 
or  high  speed,"  you  will  know  that  the  new 
Orpheola  came  home  last  week.  Next  week 
the  children  will  be  allowed  to  handle  the 
records  without  special  injunctions  regard- 
ing the  proper  needle.  The  week  after  that, 


THE  HEAVENLY  MAID        175 

the  baby  will  be  allowed  to  approach  quite 
near  and  hear  Mother  Goose  come  out  of  the 
mahogany  toy.  Within  a  month  the  master 
of  the  house  will  be  looking  for  his  hat  in  the 
cabinet.  The  intolerable  air  of  superiority 
and  aloofness  with  which  he  has  been  greeting 
you  will  disappear. 


XXI 

SHEATH-GOWNS 

FBOM  Emmeline  I  learned  that  I  had  been 
doing  the  fashion  designers  an  injustice.  I 
had  always  imagined  that  styles  were  the 
creation  of  Parisian  dressmakers  who  worked 
with  only  two  ends  in  view  —  novelty  and 
discomfort.  But  Emmeline  assured  me  that 
styles  are  a  faithful  record  of  the  march  of 
civilisation.  When  the  Manchurian  War  was 
under  way,  everything  in  the  shops  was  Rus- 
sian. When  Herr  Strauss  produced  "  Sa- 
lome," half  the  world  went  in  for  the  slim 
and  viperous  costume.  The  revolution  in 
Persia  worked  a  revolution  in  blouse  decora- 
tion. Later  everything  was  Bulgarian. 

"  In  that  case,"  I  said,  "  those  poor  fellows 
at  Adrianople  have  not  died  in  vain.  Under 
a  rain  of  shot  and  shell  I  can  hear  the  Bul- 
garian officers  rallying  their  men :  '  Forward, 

my  children !     The  eyes  of  Fifth  Avenue  are 
176 


SHEATH-GOWNS  177 

upon  you!  Fix  bayonets!  For  King,  for 
country,  and  for  Paquin ! '  The  Turks,  be- 
ing a  backward  millinery  nation,  naturally 
had  no  chance." 

"  What  you  say  is  extremely  amusing,  of 
course,"  remarked  Emmeline.  "  But  I  seem 
to  remember  an  old  suit  of  yours.  It  was 
about  the  time  of  the  Boer  War.  The  coat 
was  cut  like  an  hour  glass  and  there  was  cot- 
ton wadding  in  the  shoulders  so  that  you  had 
to  enter  a  room  sideways.  The  trousers  were 
Zouave.  Yes,  it  must  have  been  about  the 
time  of  the  Boer  War  or  the  war  with  Spain." 

"  That  was  just  when  the  feminist  move- 
ment was  beginning  to  shape  our  ideals,"  I 
retorted. 

Not  only  do  the  styles  symbolise  the  proc- 
ess of  historic  evolution  —  I  distinctly  re- 
call toilets  on  Fifth  Avenue  which  must  have 
commemorated  the  Messina  earthquake  and 
the  report  of  the  New  York  Tenement  House 
Commission  —  but  styles  actually  follow  an 
evolution  of  their  own.  They  do  not  change 
abruptly,  but  melt  into  each  other.  Thus 


178  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

the  costume  which  Emmeline  described  as 
Bulgarian  could  not  have  been  altogether 
that.  The  coat  was  military  enough,  with  its 
baggy  shoulders  and  a  bold  backward  sweep 
of  the  long  skirts.  But  this  coat  was  worn 
over  a  gown  that  was  unmistakably  hobble, 
revealing  the  persistence  of  the  Salome  in- 
fluence. To  call  this  outfit  Bulgarian  is  to 
raise  the  supposition  that  the  Bulgarians 
hopped  to  victory  at  Kirk-Kilisseh. 

I  pointed  this  out  to  Emmeline,  and  at  the 
same  time  took  occasion  to  protest  against 
the  extravagant  lengths  to  which  the  lan- 
guorous styles  were  being  carried.  It  was 
bad  enough,  I  said,  to  see  elderly  matrons 
arrayed  like  Oriental  dancing  girls.  But 
what  was  worse  was  to  see  young  girls,  mere 
children,  in  scant  and  provocative  attire.  I 
thought  the  law  might  very  well  take  up  the 
question  of  a  minimum  dress  for  women  under 
the  age  of  eighteen. 

"  Of  course  it's  disgusting,"  said  Emmeline, 
"  but  it's  their  right." 

"  I  know  that  youth  has  many  rights,"  I 


SHEATH-GOWNS  179 

said,  "  but  I  didn't  know  that  the  right  to 
make  one's  self  a  public  nuisance  and  of- 
fence is  among  them." 

"  What  I  mean,"  said  Emnaeline,  "  is  that 
we  have  outgrown  the  days  when  young  ladies 
fainted  and  wives  fetched  their  husbands' 
slippers.  We  have  broken  the  shackles  of 
mid- Victorian  propriety  and  are  working  out 
a  new  conception  of  free  womanhood.  Our 
ideas  of  modesty  are  changing.  You  might 
as  well  make  up  your  mind  to  be  shocked 
quite  frequently  before  the  process  is  com- 
pleted." 

"Oh,  I  see,"  said  I.  "Enslaved  within 
the  iron  circle  of  the  home,  crushed  by  the 
tyranny  of  convention,  of  custom,  of  man- 
made  laws,  woman  lifts  up  her  head  and  de- 
clares she  will  be  free  by  inserting  herself 
into  a  skirt  thirteen  inches  in  diameter. 
Where's  the  sense  of  it  ?  " 

"  It's  all  very  simple,"  said  Emmeline. 
"  It  means  that  we  are  having  an  awful  time 
trying  to  escape  from  the  degradation  into 
which  you  have  forced  us.  We  struggle  for- 


180  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

ward,  and  then  the  habits  of  the  harem  civi- 
lisation which  you  have  imposed  on  us  assert 
themselves.  Do  you  think  we  women  love 
to  dress?  Every  time  we  try  on  a  pretty 
gown  we  know  that  we  are  riveting  on  the 
chains  of  our  own  servitude." 

"  But  why  make  the  chains  so  tight  ?  "  I 
said. 

She  now  turned  to  face  me. 

"  The  reason  for  the  sheath-gown  is  quite 
plain,"  said  Emmeline.  "  Men  have  always 
shown  such  a  decided  preference  for  ac- 
tresses and  dancing  girls  that  we  others  have 
taken  to  imitating  actresses  and  dancing 
girls  in  self-defence." 

"  But  that  isn't  so  at  all,"  I  said.  "  Look 
at  your  trained  nurses  in  their  simple  white 
caps  and  aprons.  They  are  bewitching.  It  is 
universally  conceded  that  the  most  dangerous 
thing  in  the  world  is  for  an  unmarried  man 
to  be  operated  on  for  appendicitis.  That 
was  the  way,  you'll  recall,  Adam  obtained  his 
wife  —  after  a  surgical  operation.  The  case 
of  the  hospital  nurse  alone  disposes  of  your 


SHEATH-GOWNS  181 

entire  argument  about  our  predilection  for 
dancing  girls." 

"  That  I  do  not  admit,"  said  Emmeline. 
"  It  is  true  that  a  man  finds  himself  longing 
for  what  is  simple  and  wholesome  whenever 
there  is  something  the  matter  with  him." 

"  When  I  spoke  of  the  immodesty  of 
present-day  fashions,"  I  said,  adroitly  turn- 
ing the  subject,  "  I  am  afraid  I  gave  you  the 
wrong  impression.  It  isn't  the  viciousness 
of  the  thing  that  I  object  to,  it's  the  stupid, 
sheeplike  spirit  of  imitation  behind  it.  If 
the  passion  for  tight  gowns  indicated  a  kind 
of  spiritual  development,  I  shouldn't  mind  it 
even  if  it  was  development  in  the  wrong  direc- 
tion. There  might  be  an  erring  soul  in  the 
hobble,  but  still  a  soul.  If  the  young  girl  of 
good  family  who  strives  to  look  like  a  lady  of 
the  chorus  did  so  out  of  sheer  perversity, 
there  would  be  some  comfort.  One  must 
think  and  feel  to  be  perverse.  What  appals 
me  is  the  dreadful,  unquestioning  innocence 
with  which  the  thing  is  done.  If  we  males 
are  indeed  responsible  for  what  you  are,  then 


182  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

we  have  a  real  burden  on  our  souls.  We  have 
done  more  than  degrade  you;  we  have  made 
automata  out  of  you.  The  little  girl  behind 
the  soda  counter  who  paints  her  face  and 
hangs  jet  spangles  from  her  ears  will  just 
as  readily  comply  with  fashion  by  putting  on 
a  military  cape  and  boots,  or  a  pony  coat,  or 
calico  and  a  sunbonnet,  or  an  admiral's  uni- 
form, or  a  yashmak" 

"  A  what  ? "  said  Emmeline,  frowning 
slightly. 

"  A  yashmak"  I  replied,  meeting  her  gaze 
steadily.  "  I  use  the  word  with  confidence 
because  I  have  just  looked  it  up  in  the  dic- 
tionary. At  first  I  confused  it  with  sanjak, 
which,  on  examination,  turns  out  to  be  a 
district  in  the  Balkan  Peninsula  bounded  on 
the  east  by  Servia  and  on  the  north  by 
Bosnia-Herzegovina.  A  yashmak  is  the  long 
veil  worn  by  Moslem  women  to  conceal  the 
face  and  the  outlines  of  the  upper  part  of 
the  body." 

"  You    seem    to    have    prepared    pretty 


SHEATH-GOWNS  183 

thoroughly  for  this  discussion,"  said  Em- 
meline.  ' 

"  I  have  always  considered  it  prudent  be- 
fore entering  into  debate  with  a  woman  to 
have  a  few  facts  on  my  side,"  I  said. 

"  As  if  that  made  any  difference,"  she  re- 
plied scornfully. 

"  As  to  the  sheeplike  way  in  which  women 
follow  the  fashions  of  the  moment,"  continued 
Emmeline,  "  it  simply  isn't  true."  I  could 
see  she  was  terribly  in  earnest  now.  "  There 
are  tens  of  thousands  of  women  who  dress 
to  please  themselves ;  independent,  coura- 
geous, self-reliant  women  who  face  life  seri- 
ously and  rationally.  We  are  going  in  more 
and  more  for  loose  and  comfortable  things 
to  wear." 

"  Not  the  typical  woman  of  to-day,  I  as- 
sure you." 

"  Of  course  not  the  typical  woman,"  said 
Emmeline.  "  Any  exhibition  of  common- 
sense  by  a  woman  at  once  makes  her  a  freak. 
You  prefer  the  other  kind  for  your  ideal  of 


184  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

the  eternal  womanly.  Take  her  and  welcome. 
I  suppose  it  is  necessary  for  a  man  to  have 
something  worthless  to  work  for." 


XXII 

WITH  THE  EDITOR'S  REGRETS 

TALK  of  post-office  reform  brings  to  my 
mind  a  conversation  I  had  with  Williams, 
who  is  a  poet.  It  was  about  the  time,  some 
two  years  ago,  when  a  Postmaster-General 
of  the  United  States  proposed  the  abolition 
of  the  second-class  mail  privilege  for  maga- 
zines. 

I  knew  that  Williams  hates  magazine  edi- 
tors with  all  the  ardour  of  an  unsuccessful 
poet's  soul.  Consequently,  when  he  sat  down 
and  lighted  one  of  my  cigarettes  and  said  that 
the  magazines  in  their  quarrel  with  the  post 
office  had  overlooked  the  strongest  argument 
on  their  side,  I  suspected  irony.  It  is  Wil- 
liams's  boast  that  he  has  one  of  the  largest 
collections  of  rejected  manuscripts  in  exist- 
ence, the  greater  part  being  in  an  absolutely 
new  and  unread  condition.  Placed  end  to 

end,  Williams  once  estimated,  his  unpublished 
185 


186  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

verses  would  reach  from  Battery  Park  to 
the  Hispanic  Museum,  at  Broadway  and  One 
Hundred  and  Fifty-Sixth  Street.  Every 
poem  in  his  collection  has  been  declined  at 
least  once  by  every  editor  in  the  United 
States,  and  many  of  the  longer  poems  have 
been  declined  two  or  three  times  by  the  same 
editor,  and  for  totally  opposite  reasons. 

It  is  not  mere  brute  persistence  on  Wil- 
liams's  part  that  is  responsible  for  this  un- 
paralleled literary  accumulation.  As  a 
matter  of  fact  he  is  easily  discouraged,  al- 
though, of  course,  like  all  poets  he  has  his 
moments  of  exaltation.  The  trouble,  he 
complains,  is  that  with  every  printed  rejec- 
tion slip  there  comes  a  word  of  sincere  en- 
couragement from  the  editor.  The  editors 
are  constantly  telling  Williams  that  his  verse 
is  among  the  very  best  that  is  now  being 
produced,  but  that  a  sense  of  duty  to  their 
readers  prevents  them  from  printing  it. 
They  regret  to  find  his  poems  unavailable, 
and  earnestly  advise  him  to  keep  on  writing. 

"You   will   recall,"    said  Williams,   "the 


WITH  EDITOR'S  REGRETS      187 

principal  point  made  by  the  periodical  pub- 
lishers. Conceding  that  their  publications, 
as  second-class  mail  matter,  are  carried  at 
a  loss,  they  argue  that  the  post  office  is  more 
than  compensated  by  the  volume  of  first- 
class  mail  sent  out  in  response  to  magazine 
advertisements.  The  argument  is  sound,  as 
I  can  testify  from  personal  experience.  Not 
long  ago  I  came  across  a  five-line  '  ad '  in 
agate  which  said,  '  Are  you  earning  less  than 
you  should?  Write  us.'  Well,  the  question 
seemed  to  fit  my  case  and  I  wrote.  That 
was  two  cents  to  the  credit  of  the  post  office. 
The  post  office  sold  another  stamp  when  I 
received  a  reply  asking  me  to  send1  fifty  cents 
in  postage  for  instructions  on  how  to  double 
my  income  in  three  months.  I  was  somewhat 
disappointed.  With  my  income  merely 
doubled  I  should  still  find  it  difficult  to  pay 
my  landlady,  but  it  was  better  than  nothing. 
So  I  sent  the  fifty  cents  in  stamps.  You 
will  recall  the  half-dollar." 

"  Oh,  don't  mention  it,"  I  said. 

"  Well,  after  a  day  or  two  I  received  in 


188  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

a  penny  envelope  a  paper-bound  copy  of 
*  How  to  Succeed,'  being  a  baccalaureate 
address  delivered  by  the  Rev.  Josiah  K.  Peb- 
bles, who  showed  that  honesty,  thrift,  and 
perseverance  were  the  secrets  underlying  the 
career  of  Hannibal,  Joan  of  Arc,  John  D. 
Rockefeller,  and  Theodore  Roosevelt.  So 
you  see,  by  the  time  the  secret  had  been  con- 
veyed to  me  the  post  office  had  sold  stamps 
to  the  amount  of  fifty-five  cents.  Now  as- 
sume that  there  are  in  the  United  States  be- 
tween forty  and  fifty  thousand  poets  and 
other  literary  workers  who  would  like  to 
double  their  income,  and  it  is  plain  that  the 
United  States  Government  made  a  very  hand- 
some profit  on  that  five-line  *  ad.' ' 

"  But  that  is  not  what  I  started  out  to 
show,"  said  Williams.  "  What  the  maga- 
zines have  omitted  to  point  out  is  that  by 
rejecting  every  contribution  at  least  once,  the 
editors  are  doing  more  for  Uncle  Sam's  first- 
class  mail  business  than  through  their  ad- 
vertising pages.  And  the  difference  is  this: 
While  there  must  be  a  limit  to  the  number  of 


WITH  EDITOR'S  REGRETS      189 

people  who  will  answer  an  advertisement, 
there  need  be  no  limit  to  the  number  of  times 
a  manuscript  is  sent  back.  I  can't  see  why 
the  publishers  and  the  Postmaster-General 
should  be  flying  at  each  other's  throat,  when 
there's  such  a  simple  solution  at  hand.  It  is 
evident  that  there  is  no  postal  deficit,  how- 
ever large,  which  cannot  be  wiped  out  by  a 
sharp  increase  in  the  average  number  of  re- 
jections per  manuscript.  Editors  will  only 
have  to  augment  by,  say,  fifty  per  cent,  the 
number  of  reasons  why  a  contribution  of  ex- 
ceptional merit  is  unavailable.  My  '  Echoes 
from  Parnassus  '  was  sent  back  thirty-seven 
times  before  it  found  a  publisher.  It  would 
have  been  a  simple  matter  to  send  the  poem 
back  a  dozen  times  more  either  absolutely  or 
with  a  word  of  hearty  encouragement." 

By  this  time  I  had  made  up  my  mind  that 
it  was  indeed  irony,  and  I  was  sorry.  I  don't 
mind  when  Williams  gets  quite  angry  and 
lashes  out ;  but  I  hate  to  have  a  poet  laugh  at 
himself. 

"  Not  that  I  can  help  feeling  sorry   for 


190  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

the  editor ,  chaps,"  he  went  on.  "  You 
couldn't  help  feeling  sorry,  could  you,  for  a 
man  who  has  been  trained  to  recognise  the 
very  best  in  literature,  and  to  send  it  back 
on  the  spot?  And  the  more  he  likes  it  the 
quicker  he  sends  it  back.  Frequently  I  have 
been  on  the  point  of  writing  to  the  man  and 
telling  him  that  if  it  is  really  such  a  wrench 
to  return  my  poem  to  please  not  consider 
my  feelings  in  the  matter,  but  to  go  ahead 
and  print  it.  What  saves  the  editor,  I 
imagine,  is  that  after  a  while  he  does  learn 
how  to  detect  some  real  fault  in  a  contribu- 
tion which  just  enables  him  to  send  it  back 
without  altogether  succumbing  to  grief.  Of 
the  fourteen  men  who  rejected  my  *  Echoes 
from  Parnassus,'  one  wrote  that  I  reminded 
him  of  Milton,  but  that  I  lacked  solemnity; 
another  wrote  that  I  reminded  him  of 
Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich,  but  that  I  was  a 
little  too  serious ;  another  wrote  that  my 
verses  had  the  Swinburnian  rush,  but  were 
somewhat  too  fanciful.  The  editor  who  ac- 


WITH  EDITOR'S   REGRETS      191 

cepted  the  poem  wrote  that  he  couldn't  quite 
catch  the  drift  of  it,  but  that  he  would  take  a 
chance  on  the  stuff." 

Here  Williams  got  up  and  strode  about 
the  room  and  vowed  that  no  combination  of 
editors  could  prevent  him  from  continuing 
to  write  poetry.  "  And  I  never  refuse  to 
meet  them  half  way,"  he  said  rather  incon- 
sequentially. "  I  went  into  Smith's  office 
yesterday  with  a  bit  of  light  verse  and  had 
him  turn  it  down  because  it  had  the  *  high- 
brow touch.'  *  My  boy,'  he  said,  *  we  must 
give  the  people  what  they  want.  For  in- 
stance, I  was  going  up  to  my  apartment  last 
night  and  the  negro  boy  who  runs  the  ele- 
vator was  quite  rude  to  me;  he  had  been 
drinking.  Now  why  couldn't  you  write  a 
series  of  snappy  verses  on  the  troubles  of 
the  flat-dweller?  This  line  you're  on  now 
won't  go  at  all  with  my  readers ;  they  are 
not  a  very  intelligent  class,  you  know.'  And 
that's  another  thing  I  can't  understand: 
Why  should  every  editor  be  anxious  to  prove 


192  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

that  his  subscribers  are  a  bigger  set  of 
donkeys  than  any  other  editor  in  town  can 
claim  ?  " 

"  I  was  fool  enough,"  Williams  proceeded, 
"  to  reject  Smith's  suggestion.  I  should 
have  accepted  it.  My  poet's  mission  won't 
feed  me.  If  President  Eliot  insists  it  is  my 
mission  to  write  stuff  no  editor  will  touch, 
he  doesn't  know  what  he  is  talking  about." 

"  I  don't  think  it  was  President  Eliot,"  I 
said. 

"  Wasn't  it?  Say  Plato  or  Carlyle,  then. 
You  can't  go  on  for  ever  slapping  us  on  the 
back  and  letting  us  starve.  You  have  got 
to  back  up  your  highly  laudatory  statements 
by  purchasing  our  wares  or  we  shut  up  shop. 
We  don't  ask  for  champagne  and  truffles,  but 
we  do  want  a  decent  measure  of  substan- 
tial appreciation,  all  of  us  people  with  a  mis- 
sion, poets,  artists,  prophets,  women.  Now 
women,  here  comes  Plato  or  Carlyle  and  says 
it  is  a  woman's  mission  to  have  at  least  eight 
children." 

"  President  Eliot  said  that,"  I  interposed. 


WITH  EDITOR'S  REGRETS      193 

"Oh  it  was  President  Eliot?  Eight 
children,  says  he,  is  her  mission.  But  let  me 
tell  you  if  you  take  her  children  and  pitch 
them  into  the  waste  basket,  if  you  use  them 
only  to  fill  up  your  factories,  and  slums, 
and  reformatories,  woman  wiU  be  chucking 
that  sacred  mission  of  hers  through  the 
window  before  President  Eliot  can  say  Jack 
Robinson.  She  is  doing  it  now  and  serve 
them  right.  Mission !  Rot !  " 

He  seized  a  handful  of  my  cigarettes  and 
went  out  without  saying  good-morning. 


XXIII 

A  MAD  WORLD 

From  an  old-fashioned  country  doctor  to  an 
eminent  alienist  m  New  York  city: 

My  dear  Sir: 

I  cannot  claim  the  honour  of  your  ac- 
quaintance. My  name  is  quite  unknown  to 
you.  For  some  thirty  years  I  have  been 
established  in  this  little  town,  ministering 
to  a  district  which  extends  five  miles  in  every 
direction  from  my  house-door.  My  practice, 
varying  little  from  year  to  year  consists 
largely  in  prescribing  liniments,  quinine, 
camphorated  oil,  and  bicarbonate  of  soda; 
and  regularly  I  am  summoned,  of  course, 
into  the  presence  of  the  august  mysteries  of 
birth  and  death. 

The  life,    though   grateful,   ia  laborious. 
The  opportunities  for  keeping  in  touch  with 

the  march  of  events  in  the  great  world  out- 
194, 


A  MAD  WORLD-  195 

side  are  limited.  It  has  nevertheless'  been 
one  of  the  few  delights  of  my  restricted 
leisure  to  follow  your  career  through  the 
medium  of  the  public  press.  My  own  course, 
as  I  have  shown,  lies  far  from  the  highly 
specialised  and  fascinating  field  of  mental 
pathology  to  which  you  have  devoted  your- 
self. But  from  the  distance  I  have  admired 
the  expert  skill  and  the  consummate  author- 
ity which  have  made  you  the  central  figure 
in  an  unbroken  succession  of  brilliant 
criminal  trials.  I  have  admired  and  kept 
silent.  If  I  have  departed  from  my  custom 
in  the  present  instance,  it  is  only  because  I 
feel  that  your  brilliant  services  in  the  recent 
Fletcher  embezzlement  case  ought  not,  in 
justice  to  yourself  and  to  our  common  pro- 
fession, to  be  passed  over  in  silence. 

Let  me  recall  the  principal  circumstances 
of  the  Fletcher  case.  The  man  Fletcher  was 
indicted  for  appropriating  the  funds  of  the 
trust  company  of  which  he  was  the  head.  His 
lawyer  pleaded  insanity  and  called  upon  you 
to  give  an  account  of  several  examinations 


196  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

you  had  made  of  the  prisoner's  mental  con- 
dition. You  testified  that  on  one  occasion 
you  asked  the  defendant  how  much  two  plus 
two  is,  and  he  replied  four,  thereby  revealing 
the  extraordinary  cunning  with  which  the 
insane  assume  the  mask  of  sanity.  You  then 
asked  him  to  enumerate  the  days  of  the  week 
in  their  proper  order.  This  the  prisoner 
did  without  the  least  hesitation,  thereby  sup- 
plying a  remarkable  instance  of  the  un- 
natural lucidity  and  precision  of  thought 
which,  in  the  case  of  those  suffering  from 
progressive  insanity,  immediately  precede  a 
complete  mental  eclipse. 

On  the  other  hand  you  found  that  the 
defendant  was  unable  to  recall  the  name  of 
the  clergyman  who  had  married  him  to  his 
first  wife  at  San  Jacinto,  Texas,  twenty- 
seven  years  ago ;  an  unaccountable  failure  of 
memory,  which  could  not  be  passed  over  as  an 
accident  and  must  be  accepted  as  a  symptom 
of  the  gravest  nature.  You  cited  the  pris- 
oner's lavish  expenditure  on  motor-cars  and 
pearl  necklaces  as  evidence  of  his  inability 


A  MAD  WORLD  197 

to  recognise  the  value  of  money;  and  this  in 
turn  clearly  indicated  a  congenital  incapacity 
to  recognise  values  of  any  kind,  whether 
physical  or  moral.  This  contention  you 
drove  home  by  citing  the  very  terms  of 
the  indictment,  in  which  it  was  charged  that 
the  prisoner  had  failed  to  distinguish  be- 
tween what  was  his  and  what  was  not  his  — 
another  infallible  sign  of  approaching  mental 
deliquescence. 

You  did  not  stop  with  the  man  Fletcher. 
You  searched  his  family  history  and  found 
(1)  a  great-uncle  of  the  defendant  who  used 
to  maintain  that  Mrs.  E.  D.  N.  Southworth 
was  a  greater  genius  than  George  Eliot ;  (£) 
a  second  cousin  who  dissipated  a  large 
fortune  by  reckless  investments  in  wild-cat 
mining  shares  ;  and  (3)  a  nephew  who  was  ac- 
customed to  begin  his  dinner  with  the  salad 
and  finish  with  the  soup. 

At  the  trial,  counsel  for  defence  asked  you 
a  hypothetical  question.  It  contained  be- 
tween nine  and  ten  thousand  words  arranged 
in  two  hundred  and  fifty  principal  clauses, 


198  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

and  nearly  a  thousand  subordinate  adjective 
and  adverbial  clauses,  with  no  less  than 
eighty-three  parentheses  and  seven  asterisks 
referring  to  as  many  elaborate  footnotes. 
It  would  have  taken  a  professional  gram- 
marian from  three  to  six  days  to  grasp  the 
proper  sequence  of  the  clauses.  Yet  it  is 
on  record  that  within  three  seconds  after  the 
lawyer  had  finished  his  question,  and  while  he 
was  still  wiping  the  sweat  from  his  forehead, 
you  answered  "  Yes."  This  is  all  the  more 
curious  because  I  gather  from  statements  in 
the  press  that  while  the  question  was  being 
propounded  to  you,  you  were  apparently 
engaged  in  jesting  with  your  fellow-experts 
or  nodding  cheerfully  to  friends  in  different 
parts  of  the  court-room.  Needless  to  say 
Fletcher  was  acquitted. 

I  have  mentioned  your  fellow-experts. 
That  recalls  to  my  mind  another  admirable 
phase  of  your  services  in  behalf  of  the 
medical  art.  Your  activity  in  the  criminal 
courts  has  freed  our  profession  from  the 
ancient  reproach  that  doctors  can  never 


A  MAD  WORLD  199 

agree.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  whether  you 
have  been  retained  by  the  prosecution  or 
the  defence,  I  cannot  think  of  a  single  in- 
stance in  which  you  have  failed  to  agree  with 
every  one  of  the  half-dozen  other  experts  on 
the  same  side.  More  than  that,  I  firmly  be- 
lieve that  if  by  some  unexpected  intervention 
you  were  suddenly  transferred  from  the  em- 
ploy of  the  defence  to  that  of  the  prosecu- 
tion, or  vice  versa,  your  opinion  would  still 
be  in  complete  harmony  with  that  of  every 
one  of  your  new  colleagues.  In  offering  your 
services  impartially  to  the  District  Attorney 
or  to  counsel  for  the  defence  you  have  lived 
up  to  that  lofty  impartiality  of  service  which 
is  the  glory  of  our  art.  The  physician 
knows  neither  friend  nor  foe,  neither  saint 
nor  sinner.  From  the  rich  store  of  your  ex- 
pert knowledge  you  can  draw  that  with  which 
to  satisfy  all  men. 

I  find  it  hard  to  frame  a  single  formula 
which  shall  describe  the  sum  total  of  your 
achievements  in  the  field  of  medicine.  Per- 
haps one  might  say  that  you  have  discovered 


200  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

the  unitary  principle  underlying  the  laws  of 
health  and  disease,  for  which  men  have 
searched  since  the  beginning  of  time.  Be- 
hind all  physical  ills  they  have  looked  for 
Evil.  Behind  diseases  they  have  looked  for 
Disease.  That  unitary  principle  you  have 
found  in  what  goes  by  the  general  name  of 
Insanity.  The  cynical  opinion  of  mankind 
long  ago  laid  it  down  that  all  crimes  may  be 
resolved  into  the  single  crime  of  allowing 
one's  self  to  be  found  out.  If  a  poor  man  is 
caught,  it  is  stupidity  or  negligence.  But 
obviously,  when  a  wealthy  criminal  is  ap- 
prehended, the  only  possible  explanation  is 
that  he  is  insane. 

The  youthful  degenerate  who  resorts  to 
murder;  the  financier  who  steals  the  savings 
of  the  poor ;  the  lobbyist  who  buys  a  Senator- 
ship  and  sells  a  State ;  the  Pittsburg  mil- 
lionaire who  seeks  to  rise  above  the  laws  of 
bigamy,  may  all  be  explained,  and  acquitted, 
in  terms  of  mental  aberration.  The  only 
parallel  in  history  that  I  can  think  of,  is 
the  elder  Mr.  Weller's  belief  in  the  efficacy 


A  MAD  WORLD  201 

of  an  alibi  as  a  defence  in  trials  for  murder 
and  for  breach  of  promise  of  marriage. 

I  congratulate  you,  sir.  You  have  dis- 
covered a  principle  which,  like  charity,  covers 
a  multitude  of  sins.  Like  charity,  too,  your 
discovery  begins  at  home.  For,  as  I  have 
shown,  there  is  no  home  in  this  broad  land 
wherein  the  expert  will  fail  to  discover  the 
necessary  great-aunt  or  third  cousin  en- 
dowed with  the  precise  degree  of  paranoia, 
paresis,  or  infantile  dementia  required  to 
secure  an  acquittal,  or,  at  least,  a  disagree- 
ment of  the  jury. 

Sincerely  yours, 
AN  ADMIRER. 


XXIV 

PH.D. 

THE  time  has  come  when  a  serious  attempt 
must  be  made  to  determine  Gilbert  and  Sul- 
livan's permanent  place  in  the  world  of  crea- 
tive art.  A  brief  review  of  the  musical- 
comedy  output  during  the  last  theatrical 
season  will  convince  any  one  that  we  are 
sufficiently  far  removed  from  "  Pinafore " 
and  "The  Mikado  "  to  insure  a  true  perspec- 
tive. 

Happily,  the  material  for  a  systematic 
examination  of  the  subject  is  accessible.  It 
is  true  that  we  are  still  without  a  definitive 
text  of  the  Gilbert  librettos.  For  this  we 
must  wait  until  Professor  Rucksack,  of  the 
University  of  Kissingen,  has  published  the 
results  of  his  monumental  labours.  So  far, 
we  have  from  his  learned  pen  only  the  text 
for  the  first  half  of  the  second  act  of  "  The 
Mikado."  This  is  in  accordance  with  the 


PH.D.  203 

best  traditions  of  German  scholarship,  which 
demand  that  the  second  half  of  anything  shall 
be  published  before  the  first  half.  In  the 
meanwhile,  there  are  several  editions  of  Gil- 
bert available  which,  though  somewhat  im- 
perfect, ought  to  present  no  difficulties  to  the 
scholar.  For  example,  in  my  own  favourite 
edition  of  "  The  Mikado "  (Chattanooga, 
1913),  the  text  reads: 

And  he  whistled  an  air,  did  he, 

As  the  sabre  tru$ 

Cut  cleanly  through 
His  servical  vertebrae! 

where  "  servical  "  is  evidently  a  misprint  for 
"  cervical."  So,  too,  the  trained  eye  will  at 
once  discern  that  in  the  following  passage 
from  the  Peers'  chorus  in  "  lolanthe  " : 

'Twould  fill  with  joy 

And  madness  stark 
The  hoi  polloi 

(A  Greek  rebark), 

the  sense  is  greatly  improved  by  reading 
"  remark  "  for  "  rebark,"  unless  we  argue 
that  the  chorus  had  a  slight  cold  in  the  head, 


204  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

an  assumption  which  nothing  in  the  text 
would  justify  us  in  bringing  forward,  and 
which,  indeed,  would  be  contradicted  by  the 
highly  emphasised  summer  stylfe  in  which  the 
chorus  is  apparelled.  Thus  forewarned, 
.then,  we  are  ready  to  enter  upon  a  detailed 
examination  of  the  intensely  animated  men 
and  women  in  whom  Sir  William  S.  Gilbert 
has  embodied  his  ultima  ratio,  his  dernier  cri, 
and  his  Weltanschauung. 

In  Ko-Ko,  the  author  has  given  us  a  Man, 
with  none  of  the  sentimentalities  of  August 
Strindberg,  with  nothing  of  the  limited,  vege- 
tarian outlook  upon  life  of  Bernard  Shaw, 
with  nothing  of  the  over-refinement  of  Mrs. 
Whartori.  Ko-Ko  is  atingle  with  all  the 
passion  and  faults  of  humanity.  He  is  both 
matter  and  spirit.  He  comes  close  to  us  in 
his  rare  flashes  of  insight  and  in  his  moments 
of  poignant  imbecility.  The  .human  being 
is  not  lost  in  the  Lord  High  Executioner. 
He  is  alive  straight  through  to  his  entrails 
and  liver,  as  Jack  London  might  say.  He  is 
infinite,  even  as  life  is  infinite.  He  is,  by 


PH.D.  205 

turns,  affable,  as  with  Pitti-Sing;  cynically 
disdainful,  as  with  Pooh-Bah;  paternal,  as 
with  Nanki-Poo. 

In  the  presence  of  Yum- Yum  he  is  that 
most  appealing  figure,  a  strong  man  in  love 
torn  between  desire  and  duty.  The  firmness 
with  which  he  rejects  the  suggestion  that  he 
decapitate  himself,  arguing  that  in  the 
nature  of  things  such  an  operation  was 
bound  to  be  injurious  to  his  professional 
reputation,  reveals  a  character  of  almost 
Roman  austerity.  There  is  something  of  the 
Roman,  too  —  or  shall  we  say  something  of 
the  German  ?  —  in  the  thoroughness  with 
which  he  would  enter  on  his  career.  He 
would  prepare  himself  for  his  functions  as 
Lord  High  Executioner  by  beginning  on  a 
guinea  pig  and  working  his  way  through  the 
animal  kingdom  till  he  came  to  a  second 
trombone.  This  is  the  old  standard  of  con- 
scientiousness of  which  our  modern  world 
knows  so  little. 

And  yet  a  very  modern  man  withal,  this 
Ko-Ko.  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  Mr. 


206  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

Chesterton  would  have  loved  him,  and  would 
have  had  no  difficulty  in  proving  that  his 
name  should  be  pronounced  not  Ko-Ko,  but 
the  second  syllable  before  the  first.  He  is 
modern  in  his  extraordinary  adaptability  to 
time  and  circumstance.  Starting  life  as  a 
tailor,  he  adapts  himself  to  the  august  func- 
tions of  Lord  High  Executioner.  He  adapts 
himself  to  Yum- Yum.  He  adapts  himself  to 
Katisha.  No  sooner  is  he  released  from 
prison  to  become  Lord  High  Executioner 
than  he  has  ready  his  convenient  little  list 
of  people  who  never  would  be  missed.  Of 
his  powers  of  persuasion  we  need  not  speak 
at  great  length.  His  wooing  of  Katisha  is  a 
triumph  of  romantic  eloquence.  It  carries 
everything  before  it,  as  in  that  superb  climax 
when  Katisha  inquires  whether  it  is  all  true 
about  the  unfortunate  little  torn-tit  on  a  tree 
by  the  river,  and  Ko-Ko  replies :  "  I  knew 
the  bird  intimately."  He  is  modern  through 
and  through,  our  Ko-Ko.  He  is  at  one  with 
Henri  Bergson  in  asserting  that  existence  is 
not  stationary  but  in  constant  flux,  and  that 


PH.D.  207 

the  universe  takes  on  meaning  only  from  our 
moods : 

The  flowers  that  bloom  in  the  spring, 

Tra  la, 
Have  nothing  to  do  with  the  case. 

Far  less  subtle  a  character  is  the  Lord 
High  Chancellor  in  "  lolanthe,"  although, 
within  the  well-defined  liminations  of  his  type, 
he  is  as  real  as  Ko-Ko.  Like  Ko-Ko  he  has 
risen  from  humble  beginnings.  But  whereas 
our  Japanese  hero  attains  fortune  by  trust- 
ing himself  boldly  and  joyfully  to  life,  let- 
ting the  currents  carry  him  whither  they  will, 
like  Byron,  like  Peer  Gynt,  and  like  Captain 
Hobson,  the  Lord  High  Chancellor's  rise  is 
the  result  of  painful  concentration  and  stead- 
fast plodding.  Ko-Ko  is  at  various  times 
the  statesman,  the  poet,  the  lover,  the  man 
of  the  world  (as  when  he  is  tripped  up  by 
the  Mikado's  umbrella-carrier).  The  Lord 
High  Chancellor  is  always  the  lawyer.  In 
response  to  Strephon's  impassioned  cry  that 
all  Nature  j  oins  with  him  in  pleading  his  love, 
that  dry  legal  soul  can  only  remark  that  an 


208  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

affidavit  from  a  thunderstorm  or  a  few  words 
on  oath  from  a  heavy  shower  would  meet 
with  all  the  attention  they  deserve. 

Plainly,  we  have  here  a  man  who  has  won 
his  way  to  the  highest  place  in  his  profes- 
sion by  humdrum  methods ;  the  same  methods 
which  Sir  Joseph  Porter,  K.C.B.,  employed 
when,  by  writing  in  a  hand  of  remarkable 
roundness  and  fluency,  he  became  the  ruler 
of  the  Queen's  navee;  the  same  methods 
brought  into  play  by  Major-General  Stan- 
ley, of  the  British  army  and  Penzance,  when 
he  qualified  himself  for  his  high  position  by 
memorising  a  great  many  cheerful  facts  about 
the  square  of  the  hypothenuse. 

There  is  matter  enough  for  an  entire 
volume  on  Gilbert's  self-made  men  —  Ko- 
Ko,  the  Lord  High  Chancellor,  Major-Gen- 
eral Stanley,  and  the  lawyer  in  "  Trial  by 
Jury,"  who  laid  the  foundation  of  his  fortunes 
by  marrying  a  rich  attorney's  elderly  ugly 
daughter.  I  throw  out  the  suggestion  in  the 
hope  that  it  will  be  some  day  taken  up  as  the 
subject  of  a  Ph.D.  thesis  in  the  University  of 


PH.D.  209 

Alaska.  That  is  only  one  hint  of  the  un- 
worked  treasures  of  research  that  await  the 
student  in  these  librettos.  How  valuable 
would  be  a  really  comprehensive  monograph 
on  the  royal  attendants  in  Gilbert,  including 
a  comparison  of  the  Mikado's  umbrella-car- 
rier with  the  Lord  High  Chancellor's  train- 
bearer  ! 

As  for  Gilbert  and  Sullivan's  women,  I 
find  that  even  if  I  were  not  so  near  to  the 
end  of  my  chapter,  I  could  not  enter  upon  a 
discussion  of  the  subject.  The  field  is  too 
vast.  I  must  content  myself  with  merely 
pointing  out  that  Gilbert's  ideas  on  women 
were  painfully  Victorian.  It  is  true  that 
the  eternal  chase  of  the  male  by  the  female 
was  no  secret  to  him.  In  Katisha's  pursuit 
of  Nanki-Poo  we  have  a  striking  anticipation 
of  Anne's  pursuit  of  John  Tanner  in  "  Man 
and  Superman."  But  on  the  whole,  Gilbert 
describes  his  women  of  the  upper  classes 
as  simpering  and  sentimental  —  Josephine, 
Yum- Yum,  Mabel,  lolanthe  —  and  his  women 
of  the  working  classes  as  ignorant  and  in- 


210  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

capable.  What  an  extraordinary  example 
of  ineptitude  is  afforded  by  Little  Butter- 
cup, who,  in  her  capacity  as  baby-farmer,  so 
disastrously  mixes  up  Ralph  Rackstraw 
with  Captain  Corcoran.  Or  by  Nurse  Ruth 
of  Penzance,  who  fails  to  carry  out  orders 
and,  instead  of  apprenticing  her  young 
charge  to  a  pilot,  apprentices  him  to  a  pirate. 
Miss  Ida  Tarbell  could  not  have  framed  a 
severer  indictment  of  inefficiency  in  the  home. 


XXV 

TWO  AND  TWO 

HARDING  said  that  if  he  were  ever  called 
upon  to  deliver  the  commencement  oration  at 
his  alma  mater,  he  knew  what  he  would  do. 

"  Of  course  you  know  what  you  would  do," 
I  said.  "  So  do  I.  So  does  every  one.  You 
would  rise  to  your  feet  and  tell  the  graduating 
class  that  after  four  years  of  sheltered  com- 
munion with  the  noblest  thought  of  the  ages 
they  were  about  to  plunge  into  the  mael- 
strom of  life.  If  you  didn't  say  maelstrom 
you  would  say  turmoil  or  arena.  You  will 
tell  them  that  never  did  the  world  stand  in 
such  crying  need  of  devoted  and  unselfish 
service.  You  will  say  that  we  are  living  in 
an  age  of  change,  and  the  waves  of  unrest 
are  beating  about  the  standards  of  the  old 
faith.  You  will  follow  this  up  with  several 
other  mixed  metaphors  expressive  of  the  gen- 
eral truth  that  it  is  for  the  Class  of  '14  tot 


212  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

say  whether  this  world  shall  be  made  a  better 
place  to  live  in  or  shall  be  allowed  to  go  to 
the  demnition  bow  wows.  You  will  conclude 
with  a  fervent  appeal  to  the  members  of  the 
graduating  class  never  to  cease  cherishing 
the  flame  of  the  ideal.  You  will  then  sit 
down  and  the  President  will  confer  the  degree 
of  LL.D.  on  one  of  the  high  officials  of  the 
Powder  Trust." 

But  Harding  was  so  much  in  earnest  that 
he  forgot  to  receive  my  remarks  with  the 
bitter  sneer  which  is  the  portion  of  any  one 
unfortunate  enough  to  disagree  with  him. 

"  The  commencement  address  I  expect  to 
deliver,"  he  said,  "  will  precisely  avoid  every 
peculiarity  you  have  mentioned^  It  is  the 
fatal  mistake  of  every  commencement  orator 
that  he  attempts  to  deal  with  principles. 
He  knows  that  by  the  middle  of  June  the 
senior  class  has  forgotten  most  of  the  things 
in,  the  curriculum.  His  error  consists  in 
supposing  that  this  is  as  it  should  be;  that 
Euclid  and  the  rules  of  logic  were  made  to 
be  forgotten,  and  that  the  only  thing  the 


TWO  AND   TWO  213 

college  man  must  carry  out  Into  the  world 
is  an  Attitude  to  Life  and  a  Purpose.  Which 
is  all  rot.  There  is  no  necessity  for  preach- 
ing ideals  to  a  graduating  class.  The  ideals 
that  a  man  ought  to  cling  to  in  life  are  the 
same  that  a  decent  young  man  will  have 
lived  up  to  in  college.  The  dangers  and 
temptations  he  will  confront  are  very  much 
like  those  he  has  had  to  fight  on  the  campus. 
The  undergraduate  of  to-day  is  not  a  babe 
or  a  baa-lamb." 

He  paused  and  seemed  to  be  weighing  the 
significance  of  what  he  had  said.  Apparently 
he  was  pleased.  He  nodded  a  vigorous  ap- 
proval of  his  own  views  on  the  subject,  and 
proceeded : 

"  It  is  not  the  temptations  of  the  world  the 
college  man  must  be  on  the  lookout  against, 
but  its  stupidities,  its  irrelevancies,  its  gen- 
eral besotted  ignorance.  He  is  less  in  peril 
of  the  flesh  and  the  devil  than  of  the  scream- 
ing, unintelligent  newspaper  headline,  whether 
it  leads  off  an  interview  with  a  vaudeville 
star  or  with  a  histrionic  college  professor. 


214.          /NPOST-IMPRESSIONS 
JQ)  <o\ 

What  he  needs  to  be  reminded  of  is  not  prin- 
ciples, but  a  few  elementary  facts.  My  own 
commencement  address  would  consist  of  noth- 
ing more  or  less  than  a  brief  review  of  the 
four  years'  work  in  class  —  algebra,  geom- 
etry, history,  physics,  chemistry,  psychology, 
everything." 

"  How  extraordinarily  simple ! "  I  said. 
"  The  wonder  is  no  one  has  ever  thought  of 
this  before." 

"  I  admit,"  he  said,  "  that  it  may  be  rather 
difficult  to  compress  all  that  matter  in  fifteen 
hundred  words,  but  it  can  be  done.  It  can 
be  done  in  less  than  that.  My  peroration, 
for  instance,  would  go  somewhat  as  follows 
—  that  is,  if  you  care  to  listen?" 

"  It  will  do  no  harm  to  listen,"  I  said. 

"  I  would  end  in  some  such  way :  '  Mem- 
bers of  the  graduating  class,  as  you  leave 
the  shades  of  akna  mater  for  the  career  of 
life,  the  one  thing  above  all  others  that  you 
must  carry  with  you  is  a  clear  and  ready 
knowledge  of  the  multiplication  table. 
Wherever  your  destiny  may  lead  you,  to  the 


TWO  AND  TWO  215 

halls  of  Congress,  to  the  Stock  Exchange,  to 
the  counting  room,  the  hospital  ward,  or  the 
editorial  desk,  let  not  your  mind  wander 
from  the  following  fundamental  truths. 
Two  times  two  is  four.  A  straight  line  is 
the  shortest  distance  between  two  points. 
Rome  fell  in  the  year  476,  but  it  was  founded 
in  the  year  753  B.  C.,  and  so  took  exactly 
1,229  years  to  fall.  The  northern  frontier  of 
Spain  coincides  with  the  southern  frontier 
of  France.  The  Ten  Commandments  were 
formulated  at  least  2,500  years  ago.  Japan 
is  sixty  times  as  far  away  from  San  Fran- 
cisco as  it  is  from  the  mainland  of  Asia. 
Virginius  killed  his  daughter  rather  than  let 
her  live  in  shame.  The  subject  of  illicit  love 
was  treated  with  conspicuous  ability  by 
Euripides.  The  legal  rate  of  interest  in 
most  of  the  States  of  the  Union  is  six  per 
cent.  The  instinct  for  self-preservation  is 
one  of  the  elementary  laws  of  evolution. 
Hamlet  is  a  work  of  genius.  Victor  Hugo  is 
the  author  of  "  Les  Miserables."  I  thank 
you.' " 


216  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

"  Thus  equipped,  any  young  man  ought  to 
become  President  in  time,"  I  said. 

"  Thus  equipped,"  retorted  Harding,  "  any 
young  man  ought  to  make  his  way  through 
life  as  a  rational  being,  and  not  as  a  sheep. 
And  that  is  the  main  purpose  of  a  college 
education,  or  of  any  process  of  education. 
No  amount  of  moral  enthusiasm  will  safe- 
guard a  man  against  the  statement  that  the 
panic  of  1893  was  caused  by  the  Democratic 
tariff  bill;  but  the  knowledge  that  the  tariff 
bill  was  passed  in  1894  may  be  of  use.  It 
saves  a  rational  being  from  talking  like  a 
fool.  Idealism  will  not  keep  a  man  from  in- 
vesting in  get-rich-quick  corporation  stock ; 
but  knowledge  of  the  fact  that  the  common 
sense  and  experience  of  mankind  have  agreed 
upon  six  per  cent,  as  a  fair  return  on  capital 
will  keep  him  from  going  after  520  per  cent. 
Mind  you,  it  is  not  the  fact  that  he  will  lose 
his  money  which  concerns  me.  It  is  the  fact 
that  there  should  be  a  mentality  capable  of 
believing  in  520  per  cent.  The  dignity  of  the 
human  mind  is  at  stake.  Or  take  this  matter 


TWO  AND   TWO  217 

of  the  boundary  line  between  France  and 
Spain." 

"  If  you  are  sure  it  is  related  to  the  sub- 
ject in  hand,"  I  said. 

"  It  is,  intimately,"  he  replied.  "  I  am, 
as  you  know,  exceedingly  fond  of  books  of 
travel.  I  read  them  as  eagerly  as  I  do  all  the 
cheap  fiction  that  deal  with  brave  adventures 
in  foreign  lands.  Now  a  very  common 
trait  in  books  of  both  kinds  is  the  author's 
fondness  for  pointing  out  the  differences  be- 
tween the  people  of  the  southern  part  of  a 
particular  country  and  the  people  living  in 
the  northern  part.  You  are  familiar  with  the 
distinction.  The  inhabitants  of  the  south  are 
hot-headed,  amorous,  given  to  mandolin  play- 
ing, and  lacking  in  political  genius.  The 
people  of  the  north  are  phlegmatic,  practical, 
averse  to  love-making,  unimaginative,  readers 
of  the  Bible,  and  tenacious  of  their  rights.  I 
don't  recall  who  first  called  attention  to  the 
fact.  Perhaps  it  was  Macaulay.  Perhaps 
it  was  Herodotus.  The  idea  is  sound  enough. 

"  But  observe  what  the  writers  have  made 


218  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

out  of  this  simple  truth.  It  has  escaped 
them  that  anything  is  north  or  south  only 
by  comparison  with  something  else.  In  the 
minds  of  our  parrot  authors  the  south  has 
simply  become  associated  with  one  set  of 
stock  phrases  and  the  north  with  another. 
Here  is  where  my  Franco-Spanish  frontier 
comes  in.  We  learn  that  the  people  of  south- 
ern Spain  are  gay  and  fickle  whereas  the 
people  of  northern  Spain  are  sturdy  and 
sober-minded.  But  cross  over  into  France 
and  the  people  of  southern  France  are  once 
more  gay  and  fickle,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that 
they  live  further  north  than  the  sober-minded 
inhabitants  of  northern  Spain ;  and  the  peo- 
ple of  northern  France  are  calm  and  self- 
reliant.  Moving  still  further  toward  the 
Pole,  into  Belgium,  we  find  that  the  Belgians 
of  the  south  are  a  frivolous  lot,  but  the  Bel- 
gians of  the  north  are  eminently  desirable 
citizens.  From  what  I  have  said  you  will  no 
longer  be  surprised  to  hear  that  the  inhabit- 
ants of  southern  Sweden  are  a  harum-scarum 
populace,  whereas  in  the  north  of  Sweden 


TWO  AND  TWO  219 

every  one  attends  to  his  own  business.  As  a 
result  of  my  long  course  in  travel  literature  I 
am  convinced  that  the  southern  Eskimos  are 
not  to  be  mentioned  in  the  same  breath,  for 
hardihood  and  manly  self-control,  with  the 
sturdy  inhabitants  of  northern  Congo.  Peo- 
ple go  on  writing  this  terrific  nonsense  and 
people  go  on  reading  it.  A  brief  review  in 
geography  would  put  a  stop  to  the  nefarious 
practice.  Have  I  made  myself  clear?  " 

"  The  question  is  whether  people  are  in- 
terested in  the  countries  you  -have  men- 
tioned," I  said. 

Even  then  Harding  was  patient  with  me. 

>"  That  is  what  I  would  try  to  do  in  my 
commencement  oration  —  arm  those  young 
minds  against  the  catch-words  and  imbecili- 
ties of  the  great  world.  Altruism,  the  pas- 
sion for  service,  the  passion  for  progress,  are 
all  very  well  in  their  way.  But  first  of  all 
comes  the  duty  of  every  man  to  defend  the  in- 
tegrity of  his  own  mind  and  the  multiplica- 
tion table." 


XXVI 

BRICK  AND  MORTAR 

IT  is  a  pleasure  to  put  before  my  readers  the 
first  completely  unauthorised  interview  with 
Professor  Henri  Bergson  on  the  spiritual 
significance  of  American  architecture.  We 
were  speaking  of  Mr.  Guy  Lowell's  original 
design  for  New  York's  new  County  Court 
house. 

M.  Bergson  smiled  pragmatically. 

"  A  round  court  house,  you  say  ?  Sug- 
gestive of  the  Colosseum,  with  a  touch  of 
the  Tower  of  Babel,  and  the  merest  soupfon 
of  Barnum  and  Bailey?  Come  then,  why 
not?  To  me  it  is  eminently  just  that  your 
architecture  should  typify  the  different  racial 
strains  that  have  entered  into  the  making  of 
the  American  people.  When  one  observes  in 
the  fa9ade  of  your  magnificent  public  build- 
ings the  characteristic  marks  of  the  Chinese, 
the  Red  Indian,  the  Turco-Tartar,  the  Pro- 

ven9al,   the  Lombard  Renaissance,  the  Es- 
220 


BRICK  AND   MORTAR          221 

kimo,  and  the  Late  Patagonian,  one  catches 
for  the  first  time  the  full  meaning  of  your 
so  complex  civilisation." 

The  distinguished  philosopher  turned  in 
his  seat,  struck  a  match  on  a  marble  bust  of 
Immanu'el  Kant  just  behind  him,  and  lit  his 
cigar.  He  gazed  thoughtfully  out  of  the 
window.  Before  him  stretched  the  enchant- 
ing panorama  of  Paris  so  familiar  to  Amer- 
ican eyes  —  Notre  Dame,  the  Gare  de  St. 
Lazare,  the  Bois  de  Boulogne,  the  Eiffel 
Tower,  the  cypresses  of  Pere  Lachaise,  the 
tomb  of  Napoleon,  and  the  offices  of  the 
American  Express  Company. 

"  Yes,"  he  said,  "  one  envies  the  advan- 
tages of  your  multi-millionaires.  The  kings 
and  princes  of  former  times,  when  they  built 
themselves  a  home,  had  to  be  content  with  a 
single  school  of  architecture.  Your  rich  men 
on  Fifth  Avenue  may  have  two  styles,  three, 
four  —  what  say  I  ?  —  a  dozen !  And  on 
their  country  estates,  where  there  is  a  ga- 
rage, a  conservatory,  stables,  kennels,  the  op- 
portunities are  unlimited." 


222  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

"  But  we  have  pretty  well  exhausted  all  the 
known  styles,"  I  said.  "  What  about  the  fu- 
ture? " 

"  Have  no  fear,"  he  replied.  "  The  ar- 
chaeologists are  continually  digging  up  new 
monuments  of  primitive  architecture.  By 
the  time  you  need  a  new  City  Hall  excava- 
tions will  be  very  far  advanced  in  Peru  and 
Ceylon. 

"  The  one  secret  of  great  architecture,"  M. 
Bergson  went  on,  "  is  that  it  shall  contain 
a  soul,  that  it  shall  be  the  expression  of  an 
idea.  A  splendid  courage  accompanied  by 
a  high  degree  of  disorder  is  what  I  regard 
as  the  American  Idea.  Hence  the  perfect 
propriety  of  a  fifty-story  Venetian  tower 
overlooking  a  Byzantine  temple  devoted  to 
the  Presbyterian  form  of  worship.  Too 
many  of  my  countrymen  are  tempted  to  scoff 
at  your  skyscrapers.  But  I  maintain  that  a 
skyscraper  perfectly  expresses  the  spirit  of 
a  people  which  has  created  Pittsburg,  the 
Panama  Canal,  and  Mr.  Hammerstein's  chain 
of  opera  houses.  Take  your  loftiest  struc- 


BRICK  AND   MORTAR          223 

tures  in  New  York  and  think  what  they  stand 
for." 

I  thought  in  accordance  with  instructions, 
and  recognised  that  the  three  tallest  struc- 
tures in  New  York  symbolised,  respectively, 
the  triumph  of  the  five  and  ten  cent  store, 
the  sewing  machine,  and  industrial  insurance 
at  ten  cents  a  week. 

"  In  your  skyscrapers,"  he  went  on,  "  there 
speaks  out  the  soul  of  American  idealism." 

I  recalled  what  a  drug  the  skyscrapers  are 
on  the  real  estate  market,  how  they  yield  an 
average  of  two  per  cent,  on  the  cost,  and  I 
decided  that  our  tall  buildings  are  indeed  the 
expression  of  uncompromising  idealism.  As 
an  investment  there  was  little  to  be  said  for 
them. 

"  I  repeat,"  said  M.  Bergson,  "  your  sky- 
scrapers stand  for  an  idea,  but  they  also  ex- 
press beauty.  Not  only  do  they  reveal  the 
restless  energy  of  a  people  whjch  waits  five 
minutes  to  take  the  elevator  from  the  tenth 
floor  to  the  twelfth,  but  they  also  embody  the 
most  modern  conception  of  fine  taste.  I 


224  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

think  of  them  as  displaying  the  perfection  of 
the  hobble-skirt  in  architecture  —  tall,  slim, 
expensive,  and  never  failing  to  catch  the  eye." 

We  were  interrupted  by  a  trim-looking 
maid  who  brought  in  a  telegram.  My  host 
tore  open  the  envelope,  glanced  at  the  mes- 
sage, and  handed  it  to  me  with  a  smile.  It 
was  from  a  Chicago  vaudeville  manager  who 
offered  M.  Bergson  five  thousand  dollars  a 
week  for  a  series  of  twenty-minute  talks  on 
the  influence  of  Creative  Evolution  on  the 
Cubist  movement  to  be  illustrated  with  mo- 
tion pictures.  I  handed  the  telegram  to  M. 
Bergson,  who  dropped  it  into  the  waste  bas- 
ket. 

"  People,"  he  said,  "  have  fallen  into  the 
habit  of  asserting  that  beauty  in  architecture 
is  not  to  be  separated  from  utility.  To  be 
beautiful  a  building  must  at  once  reveal  the 
use  to  which  it  is  devoted.  But  this  need  not 
mean  that  a  certain  architectural  type  must 
be  devoted  to  a  certain  purpose.  The  essen- 
tial thing  is  uniformity.  The  same  form 
should  be  devoted  to  the  same  purpose. 


BRICK  AND  MORTAR          225 

Then  there  would  be  no  trouble  in  learning 
the  peculiar  architectural  language  of  a  city. 
When  I  was  in  New  York  I  experienced  no 
difficulty  whatsoever.  When  I  saw  a  Corin- 
thian temple  I  knew  it  was  a  church.  When 
I  saw  a  Roman  basilica  I  knew  it  was  a  bank. 
When  I  saw  a  Renaissance  palace  I  knew  it 
was  a  public  bath  house.  When  I  saw  an 
Assyrian  palace  I  knew  there  was  a  cabaret 
tea  inside.  When  I  saw  a  barracks  I  knew 
it  was  a  college  laboratory.  When  I  saw  a 
fortress  I  knew  it  was  an  aquarium.  The 
soul  of  the  city  spoke  out  very  clearly  to  me." 

He  thought  for  a  moment. 

"  But  yes,"  he  said.  "  When  I  think  of 
New  York  and  its  architecture  I  am  more 
than  ever  convinced  that  there  is  no  such  a 
thing  as  predestination,  that  your  American 
architect  is  emphatically  a  free  agent." 

"  This  seems  so  very  true,"  I  murmured. 

"  Recently,"  he  went  on,  "  when  I  was  the 
guest  of  your  most  hospitable  countrymen 
there  was  a  sharp  controversy  regarding  the 
appropriateness  of  the  architect's  design  for 


226  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

a  memorial  to  be  erected  to  your  immortal 
Lincoln  in  the  national  capital.  There  were 
critics  who  professed  to  be  shocked  by  the  in- 
congruity of  placing  a  statue  of  Lincoln, 
the  frontiersman,  the  circuit-rider  of  your 
raw  Middle  West,  the  teller  of  most  amusing 
anecdotes,  amusing,  but  —  somewhat  Gothic, 
shall  I  say  ?  —  putting  a  statue  of  this  typi- 
cal American  inside  a  temple  of  pure  Grecian 
design.  Such  critics,  in  my  opinion,  were  in 
error.  They  made  the  same  mistake  of  con- 
centrating on  the  specific  use,  instead  of 
searching  after  the  broad  meaning.  Lincoln 
was  an  American.  His  monument  should  be 
American  in  spirit.  And  I  contend  that  it 
is  the  American  spirit  to  put  a  statesman  in 
frock  coat  and  trousers  inside  a  Greek  tem- 
ple. For  that  matter,  what  structural  form 
is  there  which  one  might  call  typical  of  your 
country,  outside  of  your  skyscrapers  ?  " 

"  There  is  the  log  cabin,"  I  said,  "  but  that 
would  hardly  bear  reproduction  in  marble. 
And  there  is  the  baseball  stadium,  but  some- 
how that  sounds  rather  inappropriate." 


BRICK  AND   MORTAR          227 

"  So  I  should  earnestly  advise  you,"  con- 
tinued M.  Bergson,  "  not  to  waste  time  in 
studying  what  your  architectural  types 
ought  to  be,  but  to  build  as  the  fancy  seizes 
you.  In  the  course  of  time  the  right  fancy 
may  seize  you.  If  anything,  avoid  striving 
for  perfection.  Continue  to  mix  your  styles. 
It  is  not  essential  to  cling  to  the  original 
plans  once  you  have  started.  Change  your 
plans  as  you  go  along.  Avoid  the  spick  and 
span.  If  your  foundations  begin  to  sag  a 
little  before  the  roof  is  completed,  so  much 
the  better.  If  the  right  wing  of  your  build- 
ing is  out  of  line  with  the  left  wing,  let  it  go 
at  that.  If  your  interior  staircases  blind  the 
windows,  if  your  halls  run  into  a  cul-de-sac, 
instead  of  leading  somewhere,  let  them." 

"  But  that  is  precisely  the  way  we  build 
our  State  Capitols,"  I  said. 

"  Then  you  are  to  be  congratulated  on 
having  solved  the  problem  of  a  national 
style,"  said  M.  Bergson. 


XXVII 

INCOHERENT 

A  TOPSY-TURVY  chapter  of  no  particular 
meaning  and  of  little  consequence ;  whether 
pointing  to  some  divine,  far-off  event,  the 
reader  must  determine  for  himself. 

He  came  into  the  office  and  fixed  me  with 
his  glittering  eye  across  the  desk.  Under  or- 
dinary circumstances  I  should  have  found  his 
manner  of  speech  rather  odd.  But  it  was 
the  last  week  of  the  Cubist  Exhibition  on  Lex- 
ington Avenue,  and  a  certain  lack  of  coher- 
ence seemed  natural.  He  said: 

"  Is  there  a  soul  in  things  we  choose  to  de- 
scribe as  inanimate?  Of  course  there  is. 
Can  we  assign  moral  attributes  to  what  peo- 
ple usually  regard  as  dead  nature?  Of 
course  we  can.  Why  don't  we  do  something 
then?  Take  the  abandoned  farm.  Doesn't 
the  term  at  once  call  up  a  picture  of  shocking 
moral  degradation?  We  are  surrounded  by 


INCOHERENT  229 

abandoned  farms,  and  do  nothing  to  reclaim 
them  morally.  But  I  have  hope.  That  is 
the  fine  thing  about  the  spirit  of  the  present 
day.  It  abhors  sentimentality.  It  is  hon- 
est. It  recognises  that  before  we  can  do 
away  with  evil  we  must  acknowledge  that  it 
exists.  Look  at  the  wild  olive !  Look  at  the 
vicious  circle !  Look  at  Bad  Nauheim !  " 

"  Are  you  sure  it's  me  you  wished  to  see  ?  " 
I  asked.  "  Because  there's  a  man  in  the  of- 
fice whose  name  sounds  very  much  the  same 
and  the  boys  are  apt  to  confuse  us.  He  is 
in  the  third  room  to  your  right." 

"  It  doesn't  matter,"  he  said.  "  The  main 
thing  is  that  the  present  uplift  does  not  go 
half  far  enough.  Just  consider  the  semi- 
detached family  house.  Can  anything  be 
more  depressing?  There  are  happy  fami- 
lies ;  of  them  we  need  not  speak.  There  are 
unhappy  families ;  but  there  at  least  you  find 
the  dignity  of  tragedy,  of  fierce  hatreds,  of 
clamour,  of  hot  blood  running  riot  in  the  ex- 
ultation of  excess  —  Swinburne,  you  know, 
Dolores,  Faustina,  Matisse,  and  all  that. 


230  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

But  a  semi-detached  family,  a  home  of  chilly 
rancours  and  hidden  sneers,  too  indifferent 
for  love,  too  cowardly  for  hate,  a  stagnant 
pool  of  misery  —  can  you  blame  me?  " 

"  I  do  not,"  I  said.  "  Far  be  it  from  me 
to  censure  the  natural  antipathy  for  real  es- 
tate agents  which  surges  up — " 

"Thank  you,"  he  said.  "That  is  all  I 
wish  to  know."  He  rose,  but  turned  back  at 
the  door.  "  Of  course,"  he  said,  "  there  is 
the  other  side  of  the  picture.  Not  all  nature 
is  degenerate.  There  are  upright  pianos. 
There  are  well-balanced  sentences.  There 
are  reinforced-concrete  engineers.  I  thank 
you  for  your  courtesy."  And  he  went  out. 

I  had  no  scruples  in  directing  my  visitor 
to  the  third  floor  from  mine  on  the  right,  be- 
cause that  room  is  occupied  by  the  anti-suf- 
fragist member  of  the  staff.  Between  edi- 
tions he  reads  the  foreign  exchanges  with  a 
fixed  sneer  and  polishes  up  his  little  anti- 
feminist  aphorisms.  These  he  recites  to  me 
with  a  venomous  hatred  which  Charlotte  Per- 
kins Gilman  would  have  no  trouble  in  tracing 


INCOHERENT  231 

back  to  the  polygamous  cave  man.  He  came 
in  now  and  sat  down  in  the  chair  just  vacated 
by  my  somewhat  eccentric  visitor. 

"  Mrs.  Pankhurst,"  he  said,  "  is  completely 
justified  in  asserting  that  the  leaders  may 
perish,  but  the  good  fight  will  go  on.  There 
are  plenty  of  frenzied  Englishwomen  to  carry 
the  torch.  The  practice  of  arson,  you  will  ob- 
serve, comes  natural  to  woman  as  the  historic 
guardian  of  the  domestic  fire.  We  have 
great  difficulty  in  preventing  our  cook  from 
pouring  kerosene  into  the  kitchen  range.  In- 
stinct, you  see." 

"  But  look  at  the  other  side  of  the  ques- 
tion," I  said. 

"  That  doesn't  concern  me  in  the  least,"  he 
replied.  "  Of  course  you  will  say  there  is  the 
hunger  strike.  But  what  does  that  prove? 
Simply  that  another  ancient  custom  of  the 
submerged  classes  has  become  an  amusement 
of  the  well-to-do.  We  are  all  copying  the 
underworld  nowadays.  We  have  borrowed 
their  delightfully  straightforword  mode  of 
speech.  We  have  learned  their  dances.  We 


232  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

are  imitating  their  manners.  Now  we  are 
acquiring  their  capacity  for  going  without 
food.  Not  that  I  think  the  hunger-strike 
is  altogether  a  futile  invention.  Practised 
on  a  large  scale  it  will  undeniably  exercise  a 
beneficent  influence  on  the  status  of  woman. 
Modern  fashions  in  women's  garments  have 
already  reduced  the  expenditure  on  dress  ma- 
terial to  an  insignificant  minimum.  When  the 
wives  of  the  middle  and  upper  classes  have 
learned  to  be  as  abstemious  with  food  as 
they  are  with  clothes,  it  is  plain  that  the  eco- 
nomic independence  of  women  will  be  close 
at  hand." 

"  You  are  assuming  that  the  sheath-gown 
is  less  expensive  than  the  crinoline,"  I  man- 
aged to  interject. 

"  I  consider  your  remarks  utterly  irrele- 
vant to  my  argument,"  he  said.  "  Mind  you, 
I  don't  deny  that  forcible  feeding  is  a  dis- 
gusting business  as  it  is  carried  on  at  pres- 
ent. But  that  is  because  it  is  being  misdi- 
rected. If  the  British  Government  were  to 
apply  forcible  feeding  in  Whitechapel  and 


INCOHERENT  233 

among  the  human  wreckage  that  litters  the 
Thames  Embankment,  I  am  confident  that  the 
problem  of  social  unrest  would  be  speedily 
disposed  of." 

He,  too,  turned  back  at  the  door. 

"  Mark  my  word,"  he  said,  "  it  won't  be 
long  before  the  manhood  of  England  asserts 
itself,  and  then  look  out  for  trouble!  You 
know,  even  the  earth  turns  when  you  step 
upon  it." 

But  sometimes  you  find  yourself  wondering 
whether  it  is  really  (1)  the  solid  earth  we 
tread  to-day,  or  whether  it  is  (2)  on  clouds 
we  step,  or  whether  (3)  we  walk  the  earth 
with  our  heads  in  the  clouds,  or  whether  (4) 
we  are  standing  on  our  heads  on  earth  with 
our  feet  in  the  clouds.  It  isn't  an  age  of 
transition,  because  that  means  progress  in 
one  direction.  It  isn't  revolution,  because 
revolution  is  an  extremely  clear-cut  process 
with  heads  falling  and  the  sewers  running  red 
with  blood,  whereas  the  swollen  channels  to- 
day run  heavy  with  talk  chiefly.  It  isn't  a 
transmutation  of  values,  because  we  have  no 


234  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

single  accepted  standard  of  exchange.  It 
isn't  a  shifting  of  viewpoints,  because  it  is 
much  more  than  that. 

It  is  a  shifting  of  the  optical  laws,  of  the 
entire  body  of  physical  laws.  Pictures  are 
painted  to  be  heard,  music  is  written  to  be 
seen,  passion  is  depicted  in  odours,  dancing 
aims  to  make  the  bystander  lick  his  chops. 
Mathematics  has  become  an  impressionist  art, 
and  love,  birth,  and  death  are  treated  arith- 
metically. Grown  men  and  women  clamour 
for  the  widest  individual  freedom,  and  chil- 
dren, if  you  will  listen  to  the  Princeton  pro- 
fessor, should  render  compulsory  service  to 
the  State.  We  are  in  full  revolt;  in  revolt 
toward  State  Socialism,  toward  Nietzsche, 
toward  Christian  idealism,  toward  the  pagan- 
ism of  the  Latin  Quarter  and  Montmartre, 
toward  university  settlements,  toward  the 
cabaret.  Are  we  in  a  fog?  Are  we  in  the 
clouds  striving  toward  the  light?  Well,  I 
haven't  the  least  doubt  that  the  mist  will  roll 
away  and  leave  us  in  man's  natural  position, 


INCOHERENT  235 

his  feet  planted  solidly  on  earth,  his  face 
lifted  to  the  sun.  But  for  the  moment  it's 
puzzling. 


XXVIII 

REALISM 
(AFTER  A-N-U>  B-N-ETT) 

IN  the  dining-room  of  her  little  apartment, 
from  the  windows  of  which  one  might  catch  a 
glimpse  of  the  Place  de  la  Revolution  on  a 
clear  day,  Madame  Lafarge  was  laying  the 
table  for  supper.  She  had  folded  the  table- 
cloth in  two.  With  outstretched  arms  she 
held  the  four  ends  of  the  beautifully  laun- 
dered piece  of  napery  between  the  thumb  and 
middle-finger  of  either  hand.  Suddenly  she 
released  two  of  the  corners  of  the  white  cloth, 
transferring  her  grip  with  practised  deftness 
to  the  two  other  corners,  and  whipped  the 
flapping  sheet  across  the  table  with  a  confi- 
dent gesture  that  emphasised  the  vigour  of 
her  ample  bosom.  The  further  end  of  the 
cloth  wrinkled.  Perfect  mistress  of  herself, 
Madame  Lafarge  walked  around  the  table  and 


REALISM  237 

patted  the  offending  creases  into  an  unblem- 
ished surface.  She  was  extremely  proud  of 
her  finger-nails,  upon  which  she  spent  fifteen 
minutes  twice  a  day. 

From  the  china-closet  at  one  end  of  the 
room,  Madame  Lafarge  brought  forth  two 
plates,  which  she  placed  on  the  table  at  either 
end  of  a  perfect  diameter.  This  diameter  she 
bisected  with  four  salt  and  pepper  casters 
of  cut-glass  topped  with  silver  elaborately 
chased  in  the  bourgeois  style.  While  arrang- 
ing the  spoons  she  happened  to  look  at  the 
clock  and  noticed  that  it  was  a  quarter  past 
five.  M.  Lafarge  would  be  leaving  his  shop 
behind  the  Palais  Royal  in  half  an  hour. 
He  would  stop  at  the  tobacconist's  for  his 
semi-weekly  bag  of  fine-cut  Maryland  and 
would  probably  call  at  the  cobbler's  for 
Madame's  second  best  shoes  which  she  was 
having  resoled  for  the  third  time ;  they  would 
last  out  the  winter.  That  would  bring  her 
husband  home  within  an  hour.  In  another 
half  hour  it  would  be  time  to  put  the  cutlets 
on  the  fire.  As  she  walked  into  the  kitchen 


238  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

she  wondered  whether  there  was  quite  enough 
flour  in  the  sauce.  A  heavy  sauce  made  M. 
Lafarge  toss  about  in  bed. 

Outside,  on  the  Place,  they  were  guillotin- 
ing Marie  Antoinette.  .  .  . 


XXIX 

ART 

(WHEN  EMMY   DESTINN    SANG   IN   THE   LION 
CAGE) 

FIRST  LION:     I'm  nervous.     Aren't  you? 

Second  Lion:     Not  in  the  least. 

First  Lion:  Then  why  do  you  keep  your 
tail  between  your  legs? 

Second  Lion:  I  always  do  that  when  I'm 
thinking. 

First  Lion :  What  I  want  to  know  is4  what 
do  they  want  to  go  and  put  her  in  the  cage 
for?  The  place  is  crowded  as  it  is  and  there 
isn't  enough  raw  beef  to  go  around. 

Second  Lion:  Maybe  she  is  a  new  kind 
of  beef. 

First  Lion:  I  wouldn't  touch  it  for  the 
world —  Now  what  are  you  doing?  Are 
you  afraid? 

Second  Lion:     Who's  afraid? 

First  Lion :     What  made  you  back  into  me 

239 


240  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

like  that  and  growl  when  she  waved  her  up- 
per limbs  and  stepped  forward? 

Second  Lion:  Purely  reflex  action.  Do 
you  think  she's  hungry? 

First  Lion:  For  heaven's  sake,  don't  say 
that.  What  makes  you  think  so? 

Second  Lion:  She  has  her  mouth  wide 
open  and  she  emits  prolonged  howls.  I  wish 
she  wouldn't  move  forward  so  abruptly. 

First  Lion :  And  I  wish  you  wouldn't  back 
into  me  like  that  without  warning. 

Second  Lion:  Perhaps  she  howls  because 
she's  afraid. 

First  Lion:  Whom  would  she  be  afraid 
of? 

Second  Lion:  The  man  outside  who  is 
turning  the  handle  of  the  picture-machine. 

First  Lion :     He  has  a  red  face. 

Second  Lion:  He  must  be  juicy.  I  could 
fetch  him  in  two  leaps  if  I  were  feeling  just 
right. 

First  Lion :  There  you  go  again.  You'll 
be  backing  me  against  the  bars  before  you 
know  it. 


ART  24-1 

Second  Lion :  Can't  one  stretch  when  one 
feels  bored? 

First  Lion:  The  red-faced  man  must  be 
the  new  keeper. 

Second  Lion:  Probably,  and  she  is  howl- 
ing for  something  to  eat.  I  wonder  how  long 
this  will  last. 

First  Lion :  I  wonder.  This  is  worse  than 
the  circus  with  nothing  between  you  and  a 
crowd.  What  is  it  now? 

Second  Lion :  She's  come  nearer  again  and 
she  is  stretching  out  her  upper  limbs  in  our 
direction.  Suppose  she's  hungry  and  the 
red-faced  man  refuses  to  let  her  have  any- 
thing. 

First  Lion:  For  heaven's  sake,  don't 
speak  like  that. 


XXX 

THE  PACE  OF  LIFE 

(AS    KECORDED    BY   THE    FILM    DEAMA    AND 
TIMED   BY  A  DOLLAR  WATCH) 

FROM  love  at  first  sight  to  end  of  successful 
courtship,  $1/2  minutes. 

Breakfast,  45  seconds. 

Ascent  of  the  Jungfrau,  5  minutes. 

A  riot,  1  minute,  45  seconds. 

A  wedding,  1^  minutes. 

A  conflagration,   55   seconds. 

A  night  of  restless  tossing  on  a  bed  of 
pain,  35  seconds. 

From  discovery  of  wife's  faithlessness  to 
attempt  at  suicide,  50  seconds. 

Reconciliation  between  life-long  enemies,  1 
minute. 

Trust  monopolist  converted  to  endow  a 
hospital  and  reorganise  business  on  a  profit- 
sharing  basis,  11/2  minutes. 

A  piano  recital,  30  seconds. 


THE  PACE   OF  LIFE  243 

A  battle  in  Mexico,  l^  minutes. 

A  major  abdominal  operation,  19  seconds. 

Establishing  identity  of  long-lost  heir,  6 
seconds. 

Buy  your  hats  at  O'Grady's  —  they're  dif- 
ferent, 2  minutes. 

Getting  Central  on  the  telephone,  instan- 
taneous. 

Central  gives  the  right  connection,  2  sec- 
onds. (Incidentally  it  may  be  remarked 
that  the  film  drama  can  never  hope  to  repro- 
duce the  most  powerful  comic  device  of  the 
legitimate  stage.  This  consists  in  saying  to 
Central,  "  Yes,  I  want  two-four-six-thr-r-r- 
e-e,"  the  most  notable  advance  in  dramatic 
art  since  the  invention  of  the  inflated  blad- 
der.) 

Restoration  of  lost  memory  and  discovery 
of  hiding-place  of  lost  documents,  10  seconds. 

Orator  sways  hostile  audience,  15  seconds. 

Detailed  plan  for  robbing  Metropolitan 
Museum  formulated  by  six  conspirators,  15 
seconds. 

Twenty  years  pass,  2  seconds, 


XXXI 

MARCUS  AURELIUS,  1914- 

LET  me  exaggerate!  For  in  exaggeration 
there  is  life  and  the  punch  that  makes  for 
progress.  Whereas  no  man  can  manifestly 
qualify  as  a  live  wire  who  sees  things  as  they 
are. 

Let  me  exaggerate  the  number  of  millions 
of  bacteria  to  the  cubic  centimetro  in  j^>f 
morning  milk ;  and  the  hosts  of  virulent  bacilli 
that  make  their  encampment  on  the  unlaun- 
dered  dollar-bill;  and  the  anti-social  micro- 
organisms that  beset  the  common  drinking- 
cup. 

Let  me  exaggerate  the  virtue  of  assidu- 
ously and  courageously  swatting  the  com- 
mon housefly. 

Let  me  exaggerate  the  grey  and  monoto- 
nous life  of  the  poor,  forgetting  the  children 
who  dance  to  the  sound  of  the  hurdy-gurdy, 

and  the  mothers  who  smile  over  their  babies 
244 


MARCUS  AURELIUS,   1914      245 

in  tenement  cradles,  and  the  lovers  in  the 
parks,  and  the  May  parties,  and  the  millions 
who  patronise  the  moving-picture  theatres, 
and  the  millions  in  Coney  Island. 

Let  me  exaggerate  the  grinding,  crushing, 
withering  speed  of  modern  industry,  forget- 
ting the  hundreds  of  thousands  who  throng 
the  baseball  parks  and  the  additional  millions 
who  study  the  score  boards  on  Park  Row. 

Let  me  exaggerate  the  number  of  children 
who  go  breakfastless  to  school,  since  nothing 
less  than  25,000  gets  into  the  newspaper  head- 
lines; and  the  wickedness  of  regularly  or- 
dained clergymen  who  marry  people  without 
asking  for  a  physician's  certificate ;  and  the 
peril  of  helping  an  old  lady  up  the  Subway 
steps  lest  she  turn  out  to  be  a  recruiter  of 
white  slaves. 

Let  me  exaggerate  the  blessings  of  an  age 
when  babies  shall  be  born  without  adenoids 
and  tonsils,  and  shall  develop  just  as  auto- 
matically into  clear-eyed  little  Boy  Scouts 
and  Camp-fire  Girls. 

Let  me  exaggerate!     Teach  me  that  out- 


246  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

look  upon  life  which  the  highbrow  pragma- 
lists  describe  as  the  will  to  believe,  and  the 
low-brow  describes  as  pipe  dreams !  Save  me 
from  those  twin  devils,  the  Sense  of  Humour 
and  the  Sense  of  Proportion ;  for  in  common 
sense  is  stagnation  and  death,  but  progress 
lies  in  exaggeration ! 


IN  seven  different  ways  has  the  world  been 
on  the  point  of  being  regenerated  since  the 
Spanish- American  War.  For  the  complete- 
ness with  which  the  world  has  been  recon- 
structed consult  the  current  files  of  the  news- 
papers. 

The  world  was  to  be  made  over  by  the  bi- 
cycle. The  strap-hanger  was  to  abandon  his 
strap  and  ride  joyfully  down  the  Broadway 
cable-slot,  snapping  his  fingers  at  traction 
magnates  and  imbibing  ozone.  The  factory- 
hand  was  to  abandon  his  city  flat  and  live  in 
the  open  country,  going  to  and  from  his  work 
through  the  green  lanes  at  fifteen  miles  an 
hour,  with  his  lunch  on  the  handle  bars.  The 
old  were  to  grow  young  again  and  the  young 
were  to  dream  close  to  the  heart  of  Nature. 
The  doctors  were  to  perish  of  starvation. 
But  where  is  the  bicycle  to-day? 
247 


248  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

The  world  was  to  be  made  over  by  jiu-jitsu. 
Elderly  gentlemen  were  to  regain  the  waist- 
line of  their  youth  by  ten  minutes'  attention 
every  morning  to  the  secrets  of  the  Samurai. 
Slim  young  women,  when  attacked  by  heavy 
ruffians,  were  to  seize  their  assailants  by  the 
wrist  and  hurl  them  over  the  right  shoulder. 
The  police  were  to  discard  their  revolvers  and 
their  night  sticks,  and  suppress  rioters  by 
mere  muscular  contraction.  The  doctors,  as 
before,  were  to  grow  extinct  through  the 
rapid  process  of  starvation.  But  where  is 
jiu-jitsu  to-day? 

The  world  was  to  be  regenerated  by  dena- 
tured alcohol.  Congress  had  merely  to  re- 
move the  internal  revenue  tax  and  a  new  mo- 
tive power  would  be  let  loose,  far  transcend- 
ing the  total  available  horsepower  of  our  coal 
mines.  Denatured  alcohol  was  to  drive  the 
farmer's  machines,  propel  our  war  automo- 
biles, run  our  factories,  and  reduce  the  cost  of 
living  to  a  ridiculous  minimum.  But  where  is 
denatured  alcohol  to-day? 

The   world   was   to  be    redeemed   by    the 


BY  THE   TURN  OF  A  HAND      249 

bungalow.  The  landlord  was  to  disappear 
and  in  his  place  would  come  a  race  of  free- 
men bowing  the  head  to  no  man  and  raising 
their  own  vegetables.  Kitchen  drudgery  was 
to  be  eliminated  by  the  simple  device  of 
abolishing  the  kitchen  and  calling  it  a  kitch- 
enette. With  no  more  stairs  to  climb,  rheu- 
matism would  pass  into  history.  So  would 
the  doctors.  The  bungalow  is  still  with  us, 
and  alas,  so  are  the  doctors. 

The  world  was  to  be  regenerated  by  sour 
milk;  by  the  simple  life;  by  sleeping  in  the 
open  air.  But  where  now  are  Prof.  Metchni- 
koff  and  Pastor  Wagner?  And  the  pictures 
of '  rose-embowered  sleeping  porches  in  the 
garden  magazines  have  been  supplanted  by 
pictures  of  colonial  farmhouses  transformed 
into  charming  interiors  by  two  coats  of  white- 
wash and  a  thin-paper  edition  of  the  classics. 

Does  this  show  that  we  must  give  up  all 
hope  of  seeing  a  new  world  around  us  before 
1915?  By  no  means.  We  still  have  Eugen- 
ics. 


THE  tired  business  man  leaves  his  home  in 
the  country  just  in  time  to  catch  the  next 
train.  By  ten  o'clock,  at  the  latest,  he  is 
in  his  office,  having  ridden  up  to  the  thir- 
teenth floor  in  an  express  elevator  and  so 
gained  a  distinct  advantage  over  his  London 
competitors  who  are  in  the  habit  of  walking 
up  to  their  offices  on  the  third  floor.  He 
finds  his  mail  opened  and  sorted  on  his  desk. 
He  glances  over  the  most  important  letters, 
puts  aside  those  requiring  immediate  atten- 
tion, and  has  his  shoes  shined.  At  eleven 
o'clock  he  calls  up  on  the  telephone  and,  in 
the  course  of  fifteen  minutes'  conversation, 
transacts  a  great  deal  of  business  which  has 
to  be  confirmed  by  letter.  His  father  would 
merely  have  written  the  letter. 

Ignoring  the  primary  rule  of  health  which 

forbids  the  mingling  of  work  and  recreation, 
250 


THE   QUARRY   SLAVE  251 

he  makes  a  business  appointment  for  lunch, 
and  between  one  o'clock  and  half-past  three 
he  puts  through  a  deal  on  which  his  father 
would  have  spent  at  least  half  an  hour 
during  his  busiest  hours.  Returning  to  his 
office  he  dictates  several  letters  which  he  dic- 
tated the  day  before  and  into  which  a  num- 
ber of  vital  errors  have  been  introduced  in 
the  course  of  transcription.  This  necessi- 
tates repeated  reference  to  a  card  catalogue, 
an  operation  which  takes  some  time  because 
the  young  man  in  charge  has  been  brought 
up  on  the  phonetic  system  and  experiences 
some  difficulty  in  determining  the  proper 
place  of  the  letter  G  in  the  alphabet.  From 
3:30  to  4:30  the  business  man  is  interviewed 
by  an  agent  who  demonstrates  the  merits  of 
a  new  labour-saving  letter  file.  Donning  his 
overcoat  hastily  he  runs  to  make  an  express 
which  takes  eight  minutes  to  reach  Grand 
Central  Station,  whereas  the  local  trains 
sometimes  take  as  much  as  eleven  minutes. 

Later,  exhausted  by  his  efforts  of  the  day, 
he  just  manages  to  purchase  two  seats  on  the 


252  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

aisle  from  a  speculator,  and  staggers  to  his 
chair  at  8 :30  as  the  curtain  rises  on  the  first 
act  of  "  The  Girl  and  the  Eskimo." 


XXXIV 

MONOTONY  OF  THE  POLES 

(AT  A  FIVE  O'CLOCK  TEA) 

THE  LADY:  It's  so  good  of  you  to  come. 
It  must  be  wonderful  to  have  been  at  the 
Pole.  Do  you  know,  when  the  news  first 
reached  us,  I  was  so  excited  I  insisted  on  call- 
ing up  all  my  friends  on  the  telephone  and 
asking  them  if  they  had  heard.  It  must  have 
been  a  wonderful  trip.  Won't  you  sit  down 
and  tell  us  all  about  it? 

The  Explorer :  Thank  you.  We  left  our 
winter  camp  in  latitude  8&  degrees  7  minutes 
on  October  £4,  with  five  men,  four  sledges, 
and  thirty-two  dogs.  The  long  wait  was 
spent  in  laying  in  stocks  of  seal-meat  for  the 
dogs,  constructing  sledges,  breaking  the  dogs 
to  harness,  making  meteorological  observa- 
tions, bathing,  sleeping,  and  attending  to  the 

dogs.     In  the  cold  of  the  Polar  night,  work 
253 


254  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

moves  on  rather  slowly,  but  I  always  enjoyed 
the  restful  half-hour  I  devoted  to  winding 
up  my  watch.  On  August  24  we  caught  the 
first  sign  of  spring. 

The  Lady:     Of  course. 

The  Explorer:  But  it  was  not  till  Octo- 
ber 24  that  the  sun  rose  and  the  Polar  day 
began. 

The  Lady:     How  very  interesting! 

The  Explorer:  We  had  been  getting  im- 
patient. We  were  afraid  the  dogs  would 
grow  too  fat.  We  were  glad  when  the  edge 
of  the  sun's  disk  showed  above  the  horizon. 

The  Lady:  It  must  have  been  like  the 
first  day  of  creation;  it  must  have  been  like 
the  radiant  illumination  of  a  great  love. 

The  Explorer:  It  was  indeed.  We  im- 
mediately harnessed  the  dogs  and  set  out. 
The  sledges  had  been  loaded  several  days  be- 
fore. The  dogs  were  in  excellent  physical 
condition.  The  ice  was  smooth.  The  tem- 
perature was  minus  23  degrees  Centigrade. 
What  this  is  when  expressed  in  terms  of  Fah- 
renheit, madam,  you  will  of  course  readily  as^ 


MONOTONY  OF  THE   POLES      255 

certain  for  yourself  by  multiplying  by  9,  di- 
viding by  5,  and  subtracting  32. 

The  Lady :     It  is  all  too  wonderful ! 

The  Explorer:  On  our  first  day's  march 
we  covered  forty-three  kilometres,  the  kilo- 
metre being  equal,  as  you  are  aware,  to 
.62121  of  a  mile.  Part  of  the  way  we  rode 
upon  the  sledges.  Then  the  ice  grew  rough, 
and  we  took  to  our  skis.  We  camped  in  83 
degrees  29  minutes,  and  built  an  igloo,  which 
you  will  recall  is  a  hut  made  of  ice-blocks 
and  snow.  First  we  fed  the  dogs.  The 
daily  ration  for  the  dogs  was  one  and  a  half 
kilogrammes  of  seal-meat,  the  kilogramme,  I 
need  not  tell  you,  being  equal  to  2.2046 
pounds.  Then  we  turned  in. 

The  Lady:  Your  first  night  in  the  un- 
known ! 

The  Explorer:  As  you  say,  madam.  The 
next  day  we  camped  in  83  degrees  53  min- 
utes, fed  the  dogs  as  usual,  and  built  an  igloo. 
The  day  after,  we  camped  in  84  degrees  29 
minutes  and  built  another  igloo,  after  feed- 
ing the  dogs.  Nptjiing  happened  for  the 


256  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

next  ten  days.  The  dogs  were  in  good  con- 
dition. The  sledges  held  well.  We  made  an 
average  daily  march  of  36  kilometres.  But 
on  the  eleventh  day,  at  the  conclusion  of  a 
fairly  good  march,  one  of  the  dogs  in  sledge 
number  2  —  we  called  him  Skraal  —  at- 
tacked and  bit  a  dog  we  called  Ragnar.  We 
parted  them  with  great  difficulty.  The  two 
days  that  followed  were  uneventful,  but  on  the 
third  day  Ragnar  attacked  and  bit  Skraal. 
We  had  to  club  them  apart.  On  the  fif- 
teenth day  out  Ragnar  and  Skraal  attacked 
and  bit  a  third  dog  named  Skalder,  but  he 
eventually  recovered.  That  was  in  latitude 
85  degrees  37  minutes,  at  an  altitude  of  3,700 
feet,  and  the  temperature  was  minus  £7  de- 
grees Centigrade.  It  occurred  just  after  we 
had  finished  building  an  igloo  and  were  pre- 
paring to  feed  the  dogs. 

The  Lady:  And  always  you  were  draw- 
ing nearer  the  goal ! 

The  Explorer:  Naturally,  madam.  All 
this  time  we  were  busy  laying  down  depots  of 
food  for  the  dogs  and  the  men.  Because 


MONOTONY  OF  THE  POLES      257 

once  we  reached  the  goal  we  must,  of  course, 
get  back  as  fast  as  we  could.  We  built  a 
depot  at  every  degree  of  latitude,  or,  roughly 
speaking,  every  100  kilometres.  Our  depot 
in  latitude  87  degrees  25  minutes  was  situ- 
ated amidst  very  picturesque  surroundings. 

The  Lady:     In  that  wonderful  landscape! 

The  Explorer:  Yes,  the  spot  had  some 
very  extraordinary  ice-formations.  Setting 
out  from  that  point  we  marched  37  kilome- 
tres over  rough  ice,  fed  the  dogs,  and  built  an 
igloo.  The  next  day  we  marched  70  kilo- 
metres over  smooth  ice,  and,  having  attended 
to  the  dogs,  built  another  igloo.  The  next 
day  we  marched  50  kilometres  over  ice  that 
was  partly  rough  and  partly  smooth,  and 
had  a  good  night's  rest,  after  putting  up  an 
igloo  and  caring  for  the  dogs.  The  next 
day  the  ice  was  very  soft,  and  the  dogs  hung 
back  and  complained.  However,  we  man- 
aged to  cover  27  kilometres  that  day,  reach- 
ing 88  degrees  14«  minutes.  There  we  camped 
and  — 

The  Lady :     And  built  another  igloo ! 


258  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

The  Explorer :  No,  madam,  a  food  depot. 
It  was  on  the  following  day  that  I  first  had 
reason  to  feel  anxious  for  my  men.  Skaar- 
mund,  my  chief  assistant,  froze  his  ears. 
That  was  in  latitude  88  degrees  36  minutes, 
and  the  temperature  was  minus  40  degrees 
Centigrade.  After  being  vigorously  rubbed 
for  several  minutes,  he  was  all  right  again. 
Almost  immediately  Knudsen  complained  of 
headache  and  we  had  to  give  him  some  phe- 
nacetine.  Half  an  hour  later  Lanstrup  fell 
down  a  crevice  in  the  ice. 

The  Lady:     Horrors! 

The  Explorer:  Fortunately  the  crevice 
was  only  two  feet  deep,  and  after  we  had 
applied  peroxide  and  vaseline,  Lanstrup  was 
as  well  as  ever.  Owing  to  the  high  altitude 
we  all  experienced  some  difficulty  in  breath- 
ing. It  was  very  much  like  being  stalled  on 
a  crowded  train  in  your  Subway.  It  was 
our  ambition  to  reach  the  Pole  on  the  fifth 
(day  after,  because  that  was  our  national  holi- 
day. But  we  found  the  going  too  rough. 
JHowever,  we  celebrated  the  day  by  giving 


MONOTONY  OF  THE  POLES      259 

an  extra  half-kilogramme  of  seal-meat  to  the 
dogs  and  a  whole  cup  of  coffee  to  the  men. 
Skaarmund  had  some  cigarettes  hidden  about 
his  person  and  we  smoked  and  took  an  extra 
hour's  rest.  Two  days  later,  we  were  at  the 
Pole. 

The  Lady :  Where  no  man's  foot  had  trod 
before!  Alone  amidst  that  infinite  stretch 
of  virgin  snow ! 

The  Explorer:  Quite  so,  madam.  Imme- 
diately after  taking  observations  and  noting 
the  temperature  and  the  velocity  of  the  wind, 
we  built  an  igloo  and  picketed  the  dogs. 
We  remained  there  for  three  days,  taking 
additional  observations,  repairing  the  sledges, 
and  resting  up  the  dogs.  On  the  third  day 
after  we  raised  the  flag  over  the  Pole,  we  set 
out  on  our  return  journey. 

The  Lady :  What  thoughts  must  have  been 
yours!  You  were  coming  back  with  the 
prize  of  the  centuries,  to  find  the  world  at 
your  feet. 

The    Explorer:     Exactly,    madam.     Not 
of  the  dogs  had  failed  us.     Having  said 


260  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

farewell  to  the  flag  waving  proudly  at  the 
apex  of  the  globe,  we  marched  fifty-two  kilo- 
metres. At  the  end  of  the  march  we  built 
an  igloo  and  fed  the  dogs.  At  the  end  of  the 
next  day's  march  we  killed  two  dogs :  we  gave 
one  to  the  other  dogs,  and  the  other  we  ate 
ourselves.  It  tasted  not  unlike  fresh  veal. 
The  following  morning  we  had  hardly  com- 
menced our  march  when  Malstrom  cut  his 
foot  on  a  sharp  piece  of  ice  which  penetrated 
his  boot.  We  washed  his  foot  out  with  witch 
hazel  and  made  him  ride  for  a  mile  or  two 
on  a  sledge.  The  pain  thereupon  disap- 
peared. At  exactly  89  degrees  we  built  an 
igloo  and  slept  for  ten  hours  in  one  stretch. 
Rising,  we  killed  a  dog  for  breakfast,  took 
our  observations,  and  set  out.  Malstrom's 
foot  gave  him  no  trouble.  That  day  we 
camped  at  88  degrees  23  minutes,  built  an- 
other igloo,  and  killed  another  dog.  Our  ap- 
petites were  very  active.  On  the  way  to  the 
Pole  we  had  allowed  ourselves  two  and  one- 
half  kilos  of  food  per  day.  Now  we  were 
consuming  over  four  kilos  a  day. 


MONOTONY  OF  THE   POLES      261 

The  Lady:  Fancy  eating  four  kilometres 
a  day. 

The  Explorer :  No,  madam,  kilogrammes. 
But  at  the  same  time  we  were  travelling  at  a 
much  faster  pace;  one  day  our  record  was 
ninety. 

The  Lady :  That  was  a  great  deal,  wasn't 
it,  ninety  kilogrammes  a  day? 

The  Explorer:  No,  madam,  kilometres. 
And  in  this  manner  we  arrived  safely  at  our 
winter  camp.  Five  days  later  we  were  on 
board  our  ship,  on  the  way  to  civilisation. 

The  Lady:  How  happy  you  must  have 
been! 

The  Explorer:  We  were.  But  perhaps 
madam  may  be  interested  in  some  of  the  pho- 
tographs illustrating  incidents  of  our  jour- 
ney to  the  Pole? 

The  Lady:     How  can  you  ask! 

The  Explorer :  This  picture,  you  will  see, 
shows  our  permanent  camp,  situated  in  the 
midst  of  a  snow  plain  stretching  to  the  hori- 
zon in  every  direction.  This  is  a  picture  of 
the  South  Pole,  similarly  situated,  you  will 


262  POST-IMPRESSIONS 

observe,  in  the  midst  of  a  snow  plain  stretch- 
ing as  far  as  the  eye  can  see.  This  is  the 
sledge  upon  which  I  travelled  to  the  Pota 
The  next  picture  shows  the  same  sledge 
viewed  from  the  rear  and  a  little  to  one  side, 
and  this  is  still  the  same  sledge  as  seen  at  a 
distance  of  200  feet  to  the  left  and  from  a 
slight  elevation.  The  next  picture  shows  the 
sledge  with  its  load,  and  the  one  after  that 
shows  the  load  itself  resting  close  to  the  walls 
of  an  igloo  which  is  just  going  up.  In  this 
picture  you  see  the  igloo  completed  and  with 
the  dogs  lying  in  front.  The  next  picture 
shows  the  same  group  of  dogs  with  two  of 
the  leaders  missing.  The  next  two  pictures 
show  the  sledge  as  it  was  before  the  accident 
and  after.  The  remaining  pictures  deal  with 
similar  subjects. 

The  Lady:  This  has  been  so  delightful! 
Do  you  know,  your  English  pronunciation  is 
wonderful  for  a  foreigner! 

THE    END 


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